Search - Grateful Dead :: Grayfolded

Stimulates Gray Matter

Elderbear | Loma Linda, Aztlan | 03/14/2001

(5 out of 5 stars)

"If you're looking for the Dead's folksy, rocky blues, this CDis *not* for you. Immediately turn around & run the other direction. Fast.But, if you like their trancy, esoteric jamming, order copies for home, work, *and* the car. I enjoy this CD. It's a trip. All by itself. Headphones. CD. Launch into inner space. The open quality of the music lulls the mind into a state where old constructs bend and ego chatter stills. Anticipation. Waiting for something to happen, the music to bridge, and it does--to another bridge.Grayfolded (gra' ful ded) (folded gray matter) (brain) (mind body interface) layers and seduces. I still find myself waiting for them to segue into a rocking blues number. St. Stephen or Truckin' or *something* but know it just keeps segueing along bridging and shifting consciousness like the spaces between objects walking between things and the tween becomes concrete the negative space solid reality while "things" dissipate into the spaces between nothing.Words cannot do it justice. It's a Dead trip. Grok? Then get the CD."

Ambient timewarp

Laurence Upton | Wilts, UK | 01/12/2007

(4 out of 5 stars)

"It could be argued that the first ever plunderphonics record was the Grateful Dead's Anthem Of The Sun from 1969. In this they overlaid studio techniques involving overdubs, phasing, echo, backward tapes, pitch and speed shifting onto a complex collage of live concert performances that centered on That's It For The Other One, which was itself superimposed over a skeletal studio rhythm track. Therefore it is especially fitting that the acknowledged master of the medium, John Oswald, should devote this two-disc set to a single piece by the Grateful Dead.



Dark Star is best known in its elongated form on the album Live/Dead, the only Grateful Dead record owned by John Oswald at the start of this project (an extract of the Live/Dead version also appeared in the film Zabriskie Point). The song began life as a sub-three minute single recorded during the sessions for Anthem Of The Sun, but its suitability as a jumping-off point for extended instrumental experimentation led to it becoming an on and off stage favourite for over twenty-five years; and since the Dead (and kerzillion bootleggers) made audio documents of all their concerts, a vast archive of over 100 performances was available as source material for John Oswald's 1995 piece, Grayfolded. Forty hours' worth of these were digitally transferred to use on the project.



Using samples as short as one quarter of a second and rarely longer than 15 seconds, the resulting Grayfolded is an extraordinary technical and sonically hallucinatory time-warped achievement, reconstructed from performances of Dark Star dating between January 1968 and September 1993. Each disc comprises one complete assembled and perfectly lysergic performance that never was, the first disc being Transitive Axis and the second entitled Mirror Ashes, each with their own subtle conceptual distinctions.



Since the early seventies, in his plunderphonic pieces, John Oswald has tried to amplify the qualities that were most striking to him in the work of the artists he was plundering. In the case of the Dead, this was their extended live playing style. Consequently, by exaggerating the length of the piece Dark Star while attempting furthermore to translate the complete feel of the Grateful Dead live experience into an ambient dance outer-space type of record, he has created a virtual super-real definition of what Dark Star is.



The piece was commissioned by the Grateful Dead and when Phil Lesh commented that he would like to hear more of Oswald's landmark "folding" effects, he added to Mirror Ashes for his benefit a two second clip whereby the whole hour of Transitive Axis was heard, having been folded 16,384 times. This is just one example of the obsessively complex nature of the construction of this sublime work.



Essential to any Deadhead collection, this is a record that can both be listened to intently, enveloped by headphones, as I would ideally recommend, or ignominiously made to function ambiently, Eno-style, as background music to aid household or office chores, or in the car. It also has wonderfully expansive liner notes by Rob Bowman, and comprehensive time-maps, showing from where each sample was taken."

I could twirl all night.

orpington | Nebraska | 11/11/2000

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Possibly the best 'version' of Dark Star, this one stratches way out there and shimmers throughout. Here's a recent discovery: Slap on Disc 2 and begin playing track 1. Once it's playing, immediately reverse the track. You'll find there's and additional 3 minutes of hidden music. Well okay, it's not music per se, but it is 3 minutes of classic Dead feedback folded onto itself. Meaning some is played forward while some is played backward, all of which is heard simultaneously. Far out."