Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry has changed the way we think about music and recorded sound, his unique artistic vision replacing standard production techniques with a more wholistic approach that viewed incidental noise as important as any given instrument. Despite having no formal training and only limited equipment during most of his Jamaican heyday, Perry conjured a densely-textured, heavily-layered audio canvas that pulls the listener into unknown spaces, stretching the limits of magnetic audiotape. His enduring quest to serve the Almighty in song and abstract art has been part of an equally unique journey, spurring him ever forward into unknown territories.

  Though he claimed to come from Jupiter and once said he was born in the sky, an earthbound arrival as Reinford Hugh Perry came in 1936 in the rural town of Kendal, northwest Jamaica, where his father was a road contractor and the rest of the family worked the land; money was always in short supply and existence defined by ceaseless toiling. Little Lee dropped out of school at age fourteen to become a ranking domino contestant and after mastering wild dance steps, became a dance champion at tournaments held in the surrounding parishes. During the late 1950s, he bluffed his way into a job driving a tractor to assist in the development of Negril for tourism; he married a woman named Ruby in the town of Little London, but the marriage didn’t last. Instead, divine voices directed him to Kingston in 1961 to pursue his calling.