** Second Edition. Language: English ** Black Ark takes readers inside one of the most mythologised rooms in modern music and refuses to treat it as mere backdrop. Co‑created by Ishion Hutchinson, Kodwo Eshun, Lee “Scratch” Perry and Veerle Poupeye, the book begins from a detailed photographic and written inventory made in spring 2021 at Black Ark Studios in Kingston, Jamaica, where Perry produced era‑defining music from 1973 onward. A pioneer of dub - the radical, echo‑haunted offshoot of reggae built from sampling, looping, remixing, reverb and delay - Perry turned the studio into both laboratory and instrument, using tape, mixing desk and effects to recompose existing tracks into new sonic worlds. Black Ark shows how that restlessly inventive approach extended far beyond sound into the visual and material fabric of the space itself.

Across 600 pages and hundreds of colour and black‑and‑white images, the book documents Black Ark Studios as one of the true cradles of dub and as a continuously evolving work of art in its own right. Walls are covered with mural paintings and drawings; every surface is overrun with shape‑shifting assemblages of records, instruments, found objects, posters, newspaper and magazine clippings, appropriated books and small talismans, all layered in a way that literally intertwines with the building, the furniture and Perry’s biography. These strata of images and objects form a dense, rhizomatic environment where studio, shrine, collage and self‑portrait collapse into one. The volume catches this world at the moment before its disappearance: the Kingston premises have since been sold, and the 2021 photographic campaign was accompanied by efforts to secure and preserve Perry’s cultural objects and recordings in partnership with major institutions, including the Smithsonian.

Formally, Black Ark reflects the rhythm and layering of collage in its very construction. New photographs from 2021 are juxtaposed with stills from older documentaries, archival images and close‑ups of specific corners, inscriptions and clusters of material, creating a visual polyphony rather than a linear tour. Perry himself was involved in the book’s conception up until his death in August 2021, and his presence is felt in the sequencing, marginalia and choice of details that foreground his idiosyncratic cosmology. The idea of a “house” functions as both structuring metaphor and investigative tool. The editors use it to organise a series of thematic and historical strands: Black Ark as “spiritual yard” in the wider context of the African diaspora; as an archive of Rastafarian and other spiritual iconographies; as a site for what the book frames as archeomusicology, reading the studio as a ruin‑in‑advance whose layers tell the story of dub’s techniques, economies and mythologies.

Extended captions and essays by Perry’s biographer and the contributing authors provide a kaleidoscopic commentary on the images, linking specific objects and wall texts to episodes in Perry’s life and to wider political and cultural currents. As Hutchinson, Eshun and Poupeye trace the criss‑crossing of Jamaican popular culture, global record circuits and Perry’s own spiritual experiments, Black Ark becomes more than a studio book: it is a meditation on how an artist can turn a working space into a total environment, and how that environment, in turn, can shape the sound that leaves it.

Published by Edition Patrick Frey in paperback format (8.25 x 11 inches, 600 pages, 400 colour and 100 black‑and‑white images), Black Ark stands as the definitive visual archive of Lee “Scratch” Perry’s recording sanctum, and a crucial resource for anyone interested in dub, sound system culture, Caribbean art or the ways in which music, architecture and visual practice can fuse into a single, living work.