On August 29th, 2021, our sonic landscape lost one of its Godfathers. Lee “Scratch” Perry, composer, multi-instrumentalist, production innovator and pioneer of Dub music, left our mortal plane at the age of 85. While endless words can and have been said on Scratch’s massive discography, spanning over six decades, it’s necessary to highlight the monumental impact this man and his Dub contemporaries had on recording culture as a whole. The creative and technological innovations that occurred at Scratch’s Black Ark Studios in the 1970s have had, arguably, as much an influence on audio engineering and popular music production practices as studios like Abbey Road. Despite this, the sonic legacy of Scratch and his peers isn’t as common knowledge amongst music lovers compared to his contemporaries in the Global North. If only more folks knew that Dub from the “Upsetter” has impacted their listening habits whether they like it or not.

What Scratch and his dub and soundsystem contemporaries of the 1970s represented was a shift in philosophy towards audio technology. While many at the time would view a 16-channel mixing console as a multi-track recording utility, Scratch saw a musical instrument meant to be mastered and performed as one would a grand piano. Initially beginning as the B-Side alternative mix to the more radio-friendly A-side mix, the “Dub” mix would occur when producers like Scratch would create handmade mixes of their own, rather than allowing the band in the live room to determine their own final arrangements. The producer picks and chooses when each sound enters and exits across the faders, ultimately having the final say in what makes it to the Master tape or not. The producer, in this sense, has taken on the role of composer, arranger, performer, and engineer all at once. To Dub producers such as Scratch, King Tubby, Sly & Robbie, and several others, the studio became one functioning body: the band in the live room as the foundational bones of the sound, the mixing console as the heart of the dub, and the producer acting as the executive brain at the helm.

As Scratch describes himself:

“The studio must be like a living thing, a life itself. The machine must be live and intelligent. Then I put my mind into the machine and I make the machine perform reality. Invisible thought waves — you put them into the machine by sending them through the controls and the knobs or you jack it into the jack panel. The jack panel is the brain itself, so you got to patch up the brain and make the brain a living man, that the brain can take what you sending into it and live.”

What set Scratch and Black Ark Studios apart from their competitors was nothing short of virtuosity behind the console, as well as an ear for found sounds that most would shrug off as daily noisy nuisances, such as broken glass, sirens, or bubbles blown from a straw. The sonic stylings of the Black Ark transcended dub and soundsystem culture, the studio practices Scratch set forth has become common practice amongst music producers, regardless of genre. The idea of a producer riding the levels of their prerecorded stems, rearranging loops, musical phrases, and effects on the fly to create their own signature remix is something we take for granted in the digital age of electronic music culture. But it began with artists like Scratch, let’s give credit where it’s due.