Grateful Dead / John Oswald - Grayfolded

In the mid-'90s, Canadian media artist John Oswald, by invitation of Phil Lesh, sampled and arranged audio from over 100 different live performances of the Grateful Dead's "Dark Star" to create two sprawling supercut compositions. Grayfolded is not only an aural history of the Dead's mythical jam vehicle, it is also a sonic chronicle of the band's own fabled legacy. Oswald pulled samples from tapes dating back to 1968, when "Dark Star" was evolving into the vast cosmic fields of sound that it became known to be, all the way to the final few iterations in 1993. In doing such, every band member of the Dead from each of its eras is heard at some point in this time-hopping amalgam. Both understanding the assignment and being naturally drawn to experimentation, Oswald often layered more than one audio track at a time (as the Dead had experimented with for Anthem of the Sun in '68!), so you get surprising results of hearing the band in one decade jam against itself in another. What is already supremely trippy on its own gets even further out there; take, for instance, the beautiful eeriness of hearing multiple Jerry Garcias from across the years singing in unison. These intersections are all laid out in the comprehensive "visual time maps" diagrammed in the Grayfolded liner notes that allow the listener to watch for the addition and subtraction of varying "Dark Stars" from the audio.

It is surprising to learn that John Oswald hadn't paid attention to what the Grateful Dead were doing for ~20 years when he was granted carte blanche to the band's tape archive. The way he assembled both suites of Grayfolded shows sincere concentration to completing this project with care and fidelity. All of the hallmarks of the ever-changing "Dark Star" experience can be heard here, from appearances of thematic jams (e.g., "La Estrella Oscura" layering performances of the "Spanish Jam"), to freakouts and feedback squalls, to the Phil excursions into deep sound familiar of many 1972-'74 Stars, to the MIDI explorations of the late '80s and '90s, to the ambient expeditions of all eras (see the incredible "Cease Tone Beam," in which you can be forgiven for forgetting what band you're listening to). The pacing and flow of Grayfolded maintains that organic feeling of the Dead charting their course on stage when improvising, and Oswald never makes the playback sound overly busy when interpolating multiple audio sources.