Music production is sometimes perceived as a largely technical exercise, a practice grounded in science and rationality. But for many of the most gifted producers, their relationship with the recording studio and its tools derives from a more enigmatic source; a place that the least cynical of us might describe as spiritual. For Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, both the recording studio and the music-making process held such an elevated significance. “I see the studio must be like a living thing, a life itself,” Perry once said. “The machine must be live and intelligent. Then I put my mind into the machine and the machine perform reality.”
