“‘Dark Star’ is always playing somewhere. All we do is tap into it,” Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh supposedly said. Grayfolded, John Oswald’s epic collage of the Dead’s hallmark longform jam, assembled from fragments of more than 100 different performances spanning the band’s 30-year career, could be seen as an attempt to simultaneously channel every single version of “Dark Star” that’s ever been played or will be played, in every “somewhere” that’s ever existed.
Originally appearing as two CDs released in 1994 and 1995, this three-LP reissue, remastered and with pieces reworked by Oswald to avoid fade-outs, was funded by a Kickstarter campaign that raised nearly $50,000. (A 2014 pressing of this set sold out fast.) Originally scheduled for a July 25 release, vinyl delays have pushed it back to sometime in August, according to the label, Important Records.Oswald is the British composer and provocateur behind Plunderphonics, the art of taking musical samples and, through cutting, warping, and splicing, making new songs. It’s the sort of thing that gives copyright lawyers fits. When Lesh invited Oswald to work with the Dead’s catalog in 1994, Oswald was probably most known for his sensibly named 1989 album Plunderphonics, which contained a ruthless dissection of Michael Jackson’s “Bad” (renamed “Dab”), and legally could not be offered for sale under any circumstances. (The lawyers still ensured most of the copies were destroyed anyway.)
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Lesh may have expected Oswald to treat the music of his band in a similarly radical fashion, chopping, blending, and disrupting until the Dead’s byzantine meanderings were disfigured beyond recognition. Instead, Oswald, in true contrarian form, expanded “Dark Star,” delivering a nearly two-hour odyssey that more than doubled the longest versions of the song in the sizable Dead archive. (Deadheads are still arguing over the true longest version of “Dark Star,” and will be until the sun explodes.) And though Oswald tinkered with the basics considerably—the song’s distinctive opening theme becomes more of a transitory motif and is never heard in full, while Jerry Garcia’s vocals are sporadic and greatly altered when they do appear—it’s still very much “Dark Star” by the Grateful Dead. Just more so. The sheer maximalism of Oswald’s endeavor makes it tempting to call Grayfolded the ultimate “Dark Star.” It is, after all, the only Dead work to feature every single member, including the numerous keyboard players (many of them deceased) from the iconic Pigpen to the irrepressible Brent Mydland. And it can be a lot of fun for casual listeners and Dead cognoscenti alike to hear a fruity Mydland synth vamp erupt out of an elegant Keith Godchaux piano line, or to experience the uncanny thrill of several Garcia solos from different decades interlocking in a musky embrace. But Grayfolded is more than a bit of sonic fan fiction or an experimental construction. From all the shifting rhythms, mutating guitar tones and ambient sprawl in Oswald’s hall of mirrors there emerges a surprisingly coherent vision: “Dark Star” as a whirlpool of possibilities, parallels, vertices, and vortexes, a song so fluid and open-ended that it can undergo any sorcery or alchemy, yet stubborn enough to remain always, unmistakably, itself.
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