Grayfolded – John Oswald & The Grateful Dead (1996) (*****)

What’s to like?

Not your average Grateful Dead album, but the Grateful Dead album every fan always hoped to hear them play in concert. A fascinating trip through one song, spread across two discs, where music, technology and boundless imagination collide.

The low down

Imagine a celebrated band allowing an outside composer access to their vaults, to then create a brand new piece of music sourced from one hundred performances of the same song over a period of twenty five years. The end result becomes something unique, that still sounds like the band’s song, but has evolved into something more…something infinite. An idea that has travelled far beyond its humble origins.

And that’s perhaps the best way I can introduce you to an album titled Grayfolded, created by composer John Oswald, as a reimagining of  the Grateful Dead’s totemic song Dark Star.

In many ways, Dark Star is the song which defines the band’s legacy, always greeted with euphoria by the fans when played live, even though they (and the band) had no idea where the song would take them that night. And over fifty years later, it’s still a song that stimulates online discussion among the Dead’s community (or Deadheads) about which is the best version, or breaking down the component parts of a particular performance and analysing or contrasting them in forensic detail.

Dark Star emerged in 1968 as a brief three-minute single, not even considered for inclusion on the upcoming album Anthem Of The Sun, but like some kind of extra-terrestrial amoeba it rapidly grew into something much bigger in concert, to the point where it almost felt like the band could no longer contain it. The song became a vehicle for the band to explore the possibilities and push the boundaries of live improvised performance, and could last anything from several minutes to an hour. It very much depended on the six individuals on stage, and whatever subliminal vibes they were feeling collectively.

The liner notes to Grayfolded describe Dark Star as a touchstone song that defines the Dead, and if there was one song ripe for reconstruction, this was it. John Oswald certainly thought so, after he was invited by bassist Phil Lesh to explore the band’s music vaults and source recordings for the project. (Lesh himself was no stranger to the avant garde, and had been the prime mover behind the Dead’s experiments in sound for their Anthem album.)

Oswald shortlisted almost a hundred live recordings of Dark Star as his source material, and then spent months applying a technique he called “Plunderphonics”, where he would deconstruct the recordings note by note, beat by beat, and then rebuild and re-layer them into something completely different.

In some cases this involved folding down the music – for example, compressing a thirty second piece of music into fifteen seconds worth of music, and then folding that piece down further to seven and a half seconds of music. The net result would be a piece of music four times shorter than its origins, but now four times as dense in detail.

Other approaches included manipulating the sound with echoes, preludes, or repeats so diminished that you can barely make then out, and yet all combining into something greater than its constituent parts. On one track – Cease The Tone Beam – ninety seconds of material is slowed down and stretched out to twelve minutes of music. The listener might be fooled into thinking they’re hearing a synthesiser, but in fact it’s just a handful of seconds of sound extended beyond anything the players might have had in mind during that performance.

The vocals also get similar treatment. The original song only has a couple of brief verses, but Oswald found ways to manipulate the vocals so that they weave in and out of the music, and not at the points where experienced fans would expect to hear them. In fact, single sung notes are extended or multiplied to make them almost unrecognisable. (Think Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody folded down and then re-extended to the power of ten!)

Oswald also resisted the developing trend at the time to recreate the live drum playing as electronic beats, and instead folded down sixty four drum solos to produce something rhythmically unusual and unique. Certainly, sounds I’d never heard before.

However, what makes this piece of work so unique is that Oswald was not even a fan of the Dead, and even though he attended a concert to get a feel for the band’s music, he was less impressed with the actual music and more interested in how listeners were reacting to it. As a result, he approached the Grayfolded project with a completely open mind, unburdened by fan or band expectations. In fact, he ended up with so much material that it had to be spread across two discs (Transitive Axis and Mirror Ashes), and he chose to end the first disc on a literal cliffhanger of a note, which was then resumed as the second disc began.

And for those fans keen to identify the source of each snippet of music, Oswald created time maps delineating where each of the hundred plus concerts occurs within the overall composition. The source material was not necessarily reconstructed in chronological order of its performance date, and time jumps backward and forward across the music, meticulously planned but giving the impression of timelessness.

I went into this album as a fan of the band, and wondered if the end result would be too radical for my taste, but in fact it turned out to be a fascinating, and fun, listening experience (and no, I’m nowhere near qualified enough to spot the joins!). Perhaps I found it easy to absorb, having enjoyed the sound experiments of Steven Wilson’s Bass Communion project, and more recently explored Max Richter’s reimagining of The Four Seasons (which you can read about here.)

However, this is an album that can be enjoyed by anyone with an interest in ambient musical explorations. There is no shortage of melody, courtesy of sublime guitar solos from Jerry Garcia, and the source music is natural and organic – a real band playing real instruments, and giving career-best performances in the clips selected.

Or as Rob Bowman’s liner notes for the album put it – “The long strange trip got a little stranger on this one.”