Lee Perry used eccentric methods such as cleaning the tape heads with his t-shirt and blowing the herb marauguana smoke onto the master tapes as they rolled, ensuring that the music recorded in the Black Ark Studio would have a infected make-up of magical eminence to it ensuring that they would never be antediluvian. Using only moderate equipment, he was able to take four tracks and make them sound like eight or more by discarding several tracks onto one and then repeating the process over again. It was only four tracks on the machine, Perry explains, but I was picking up twenty from the African Heritage squad. Astounding and incredible albums from Max Romeo; War In A Babylon, The Upsetters; Super Ape and Son Of Thunder with Lee Perry, Junior Murvin; Police And Thieves, British chart smash hit ; Party Time, The Congos; Heart Of The Congos and Dave Barker; Shock Of Mighty. Along with hundreds of heavy duty singles flowed from the Black Ark between 1976 and 1979 in that era, represents the pinnacle in Jamaican music. Reggae at its highest heights and the greatest ascendancy in recording production. While a music mania was hotting up in Perry's studio, so was the political climate in Jamaica. Anti-violence songs that foretold a coming apocalypse became the order of the day, such as Max Romeo's "War In A Babylon", George Faith's Guide Line, and Perry's own fevered plea for sanity: City Too Hot. Lee Perry was never a stranger to extreme words executing cute metaphors, and outer space productions seems to mirror the current heat and convulsive occurrences in the recording studio. Who is to say if Lee Perry was not trying to develop further into the impenetrable realms of corpulent melodies of music achieved by classical geniuses before him. |
