Lee “Scratch” Perry died in August 2021 at the age of 85. He was, by almost any measure, one of the most influential figures in the history of recorded music, and one of the least understood. The man who essentially invented dub production, who turned the recording studio into an instrument, who made records so strange and so visionary that four decades of electronic music still hasn’t caught up to them, was also a man who painted his beard silver, communed with spirits, and once burned down his own studio in Kingston because something in it had gone wrong spiritually. He was not a tidy legacy.

The news that a posthumous album exists, recorded with German electronic duo Mouse on Mars at their Berlin studio in December 2019, is the kind of thing that should be approached with caution. Posthumous releases have a long history of diminishing the work of the people they claim to celebrate. But “Spatial, No Problem,” which arrives June 5th via Domino, sounds like something different: a genuine creative encounter between artists who understood each other.

Mouse on Mars, the duo of Jan St. Werner and Andi Toma, have been making weird, textured, boundary-pushing electronic music since the early 1990s. They are not chasers. When they describe the sessions with Perry, the account has the quality of two forces simply occupying the same space and letting something happen. “We hardly spoke about what we were doing. We met and got going,” Werner said. They cooked fish soup. They laughed. Eight tracks came out of it.

The album title itself is a small piece of genius. When the group discussed Spatial Audio with Perry, his response was characteristically direct: “Spatial. No problem.” That kind of casual confidence about something most producers would treat as a technical achievement captures something essential about who Perry was. For him, space was always the medium. He understood reverb and echo and the positioning of sound in three dimensions before those were studio terms. He understood them as spiritual facts.

His work at the Black Ark studio in the 1970s produced records that sound nothing like their era. The Congos’ “Heart of the Congos,” Max Romeo’s “War Inna Babylon,” his own Upsetters records: these were not just well-produced reggae albums. They were objects from a different sonic universe, one where production decisions were made on cosmological rather than commercial grounds. Layers of sound that shouldn’t have coexisted, did. Voices that shouldn’t have fit in a mix, fit. Perry seemed to operate by rules that he had made up himself and that nobody else had access to.

What Mouse on Mars likely understood, and what makes “Spatial, No Problem” worth anticipating, is that Perry’s approach to sound was not nostalgic even in his 70s. He wasn’t recreating the Black Ark. He was still looking forward, still treating the studio as a place where impossible things were possible. The Domino partnership suggests the label understood the material was not a curiosity but a document of something real.

A sound installation at Barbican’s Project A Black Planet exhibition, running June 5th to 13th, will present the album in spatial audio. That feels appropriate. Perry spent his whole career trying to make records that put the listener inside the sound rather than in front of it. Hearing his final work in a spatial audio environment at a London arts institution is, in a strange way, a fitting end to a career that could never be fully contained by the formats it existed in.

“Spatial. No problem.” Five decades of innovation compressed into four words. That was Lee “Scratch” Perry.