Lee “Scratch” Perry died in August 2021, and the music world lost someone it did not fully understand while he was alive and probably still does not fully understand now. That uncertainty is not a failure of comprehension. It is, in a real sense, the point. Perry spent his life making work that resisted the categories people tried to put it in, and the announcement this week that his final album, Spatial, No Problem, will arrive on June 5 via Domino, does nothing to tidy that legacy into something neat.

The record is a collaboration with Mouse on Mars, the German electronic duo of Jan St. Werner and Andi Toma, recorded in their Berlin-based Paraverse Studio in December 2019, less than two years before Perry’s death at 85. The lead single “Rockcurry” has been shared, and it sounds exactly like what you might hope for: layered, strange, rhythmically alive, Perry’s voice moving through the mix with the particular authority of someone who genuinely does not care what you think about what he is doing. From June 5 through June 13, the Barbican’s Project A Black Planet exhibition in London will present the album in spatial audio, which is a fitting venue for material this deliberately dimensional.

The album’s title came from a conversation about spatial audio. When the Mouse on Mars duo brought up the technology, Perry responded simply: “Spatial. No problem.” That line tells you a great deal about who he was. He approached the unfamiliar with the same confidence he brought to everything else, the certainty that his instincts were a reliable guide regardless of what the tool or format happened to be.

Perry’s career spanned six decades and encompassed a body of work that almost defies summary. He started in Jamaican music in the early 1960s, initially as a session worker and performer before developing as a producer of extraordinary range and unconventionality. His Black Ark studio in Kingston, where he worked throughout the 1970s, became one of the most important recording spaces in the history of popular music. The records he produced there, with artists including Bob Marley and the Wailers, Max Romeo, Junior Murvin, and the Heptones, remain foundational texts in reggae and dub.

But reducing Perry to “the producer of those reggae records” would be like describing Brian Eno as “the person who played in Roxy Music.” The Black Ark work was extraordinary, but Perry kept evolving after that chapter closed, collaborating across genres, absorbing electronic music, working with artists as varied as the Beastie Boys, Adrian Sherwood, and countless European experimentalists. His late-career records, made well into his seventies and eighties, are genuinely peculiar in ways that have nothing to do with eccentricity as a performance and everything to do with a mind that never stopped moving.

The Mouse on Mars collaboration fits that trajectory precisely. Werner described the session as starting without much discussion: “We met and got going. He was laughing a lot and we laughed along. We also cooked and ate fish soup and papayas.” That ease is audible in “Rockcurry.” There is no sense of two parties negotiating their aesthetics. Perry inhabited whatever space he was in as though he had always been there.

Spatial, No Problem will not resolve the question of what Lee Perry was or what his music means. That is not what it is for. What it does is offer one more document of a mind working at full capacity, right up near the end, with collaborators worthy of the meeting. That is not nothing. In Perry’s case, it is probably everything.