Kingston has long been associated with the world’s most renowned reggae artists. Everyone from Bob Marley to The Congos to Max Romeo have recorded albums in the city and Lee Perry’s infamous Black Ark Studios. Established in 1973 in Perry’s back garden, the studio saw a steady stream of reggae royalty until its destruction in the early 80s.
Despite the studio’s relatively primitive set-up, Perry’s recording genius ensured that the studio’s recordings were some of the most sonically innovative productions to come out during the second half of the 1970s. Baffling his contemporaries, and music producers up to this day, Perry’s originality in his recording process resulted in the studio being regarded as a Mecca for producers the world over.
One of the biggest developments to come out of Black Ark was Perry’s overdubbing technique. Using a 4 track mixer, he would overdub layers of sound effects onto the various instrumental and vocal tracks with such a degree of precision that Jamaica’s other top producers could not compete with his sound, despite possessing much better equipment such as 16 track mixers.
While Perry’s recording techniques may have been strange, they undoubtedly produced results. Doing things such as burying a microphone in the base of a palm tree and tapping it to produce a bass drum sound or getting Watty Burnett to sing through a cardboard tube covered in tin-foil to create a mooing sound, led to Perry being regarded as both an innovator and an eccentric. He viewed his studio as a spiritual place, and would often throw fluids such as whiskey, blood and even urine into his tapes to enhance their spiritual properties.
However, a while after he recorded The Congos classic debut album, In The Heart of the Congos, Perry began to become even more erratic in his behaviours. He allegedly covered the walls of the Black Ark in indecipherable writings before burning the studio to the ground in an effort to cleanse it from the “unclean spirits” that he believed to be populating it. In another version of the story the studio was burned down as the result of an electrical fault while Perry was attempting to rebuild a part of it. Others speculate that he burned it down as he was being blackmailed by gangsters who wanted a share of the profits from his productions. Whatever the cause, upon its destruction a cornerstone of Kingston, and for the world of reggae in general, was lost. Shortly after this, Perry moved to Switzerland, and then London where he continued to make music, but none of it has quite matched the material of the Black Ark era.
