Coming after Xenakis, Lee Perry is one of those polar opposites who you feel at some level, beyond articulation, also shares some ineffable similarities.
Perhaps it's something to do with Chaos Theory, the switching to and fro between grand scale and implausibly minute details. Xenakis plots and maps it in order to reconstruct it, while Perry manifests it more intuitively.
But unlike Xenakis's compositions, Perry's productions very much can be left to wash over you. All of these tracks are very familiar to me through repeated plays many years ago (often while I was working, I think), though I don't know the track titles or even the artists in most cases.
Several of these tracks seem to have been mastered from vinyl copies rather than the original master tapes. You can hear the surface noise, but that just adds another patina of complexity to the sound. As in John Peel's famous quote, "Life has surface noise."
MusicBrainz entry for disc 1 disc 2 |
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