Grayfolded
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Grayfolded | ||
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| Live album by Grateful Dead | ||
| Released | 1994 and 2004 | |
| Recorded | 1968 – 1993 | |
| Genre | Psychedelic rock Jam |
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| Length | 103:32 | |
| Label | Artifact Music | |
| Producer(s) | John Oswald | |
| Professional reviews | ||
|---|---|---|
| Grateful Dead chronology | ||
| Dick's Picks Volume 1 (1993) |
Grayfolded (1994) |
Dick's Picks Volume 2 (1995) |
Grayfolded is an album produced by John Oswald featuring the legendary Grateful Dead song "Dark Star". The album's name, "Grayfolded", is a homophone of sorts of "Grateful Dead".
Using over a hundred different performances of the song "Dark Star" between 1968 and 1993, Oswald built, layered, and "folded" all of them to produce one large, recomposed version spanning sixteen minutes short of two hours.
In essence, it is the only Grateful Dead or Grateful Dead-related record that features participation by every person who was ever in the group between 1965 and 1995.
Gary Lambert, editor of the Grateful Dead Almanac said : "The decade-leaping GRAYFOLDED is an astonishingly accurate evocation of that sublime, hallucinatory 'unstuck in time' feeling one gets at a really good Grateful Dead show."
"This double CD, lasting almost two blissful hours, has been rightly acclaimed as the ultimate Dark Star, the one you always hoped the Dead would one day get around to playing." - The London Daily Telegraph
"GRAYFOLDED is literally a hundred or so great nights rolled into one extraordinary, extended high... two Cds' worth of gorgeous sonic orgami." - Rolling Stone, best of the year list
"... An extended time-warped psychedelic jam that is meticulously hallucinatory." - New York Times, top 10 of the year
"Even casual Dead fans will be floored by this astonishing new project. Absolutely brilliant." - Toronto Sun, album of the decade
"On GRAYFOLDED (fony) plunderphonics composer John Oswald's 1995 double disc length 'cover' of The Grateful Dead's most spacebound vehicle plundered and spliced together more than four decades of live Dead versions into one definitive, maximalist version. Oswald created orchestras of timewarped Jerry Garcias loosing waterfalls of lunar notes and feedback patterns that bled into slow smears of vocals and supernaturally compacted jams. The first - straighter - part, "Transitive Axis", relies mostly on overlap techniques, which permit Oswald to fly in various soundboard recordings and patch particularly zoned solos into huge vertically stacked harmonies. [...] Part two, "Mirror Ashes", is considerably more dosed, with swarms of time-altered sound effectively working as huge brackets enveloping ever more compacted takes. It's a fantastically psychedelic listen ..."
- The WIRE (#261 November 2005) from "60 cover versions that rattle the state of song"
GRAYFOLDED Release Sheet in pdf format :
http://www.pfony.com/grayfolded/Grayfolded.pdf
http://www.pfony.com/grayfolded/Lightshow.pdf
GRAYFOLDED Flash promo :
http://www.pfony.com/grayfolded/index.html
GRAYFOLDED was released 1994/5 in two parts on the SWELL/Artifact label. Out of print by 2000, Oswald's fony label reissued the GRAYFOLDED 2cd disc set[catalogue number : fony 68/95], which includes an essay by musicologist Rob Bowman, 2 timemaps of Dark Stars, as well as several interviews, in August 2004.
In an interview in 1995 Oswald described how the project came about;
Phil Lesh called me up and talked me into doing it. At that point, I hadn't listened to any Grateful Dead music in about twenty years. I did think I was qualified, because I do think it's often a good idea to come into a project without a lot of prior knowledge and get kind of an alien's overview of what the music seems to be, and then put in your own two cents of what you think it should be. And I think that was the case for this. During the course of working on it, I went to a couple of Grateful Dead concerts, but other than that, I haven't listened to anything except these hundred versions of 'Dark Star' that I found in the vaults.
On another occasion Oswald said that he had been asked (by David Gans) to produce something very short, he explained his response to this suggestion:
What interested me most about the Grateful Dead was their extended playing style. I wrote a counter-proposal to David saying, 'Well, I've been thinking about it and all I can hear is the opposite - something very long.
Contents |
[edit] Track listing
[edit] TransitiveAxis - Disc one
- "Novature (Formless Nights Fall)" – 1:19
- "Pouring Velvet" – 2:58
- "In Revolving Ash Light" – 17:00
- "Clouds Cast" – 7:13
- "Through" – 8:52
- "Fault Forces" – 6:19
- "The Phil Zone" – 4:45
- "La Estrella Oscura" – 9:33
- "Recedes (Well We Can)" – 1:56
[edit] MirrorAshes - Disc two
- "Transilience" – 0:07
- "73rd Star Bridge Sonata" – 13:41
- "Cease Tone Beam" – 12:45
- "The Speed of Space" – 8:49
- "Dark Matter Problem/Every Leaf Is Turning" – 6:42
- "Foldback Time" – 1:33
[edit] Musical personnel
- Jerry Garcia - lead guitar, vocals
- Bob Weir - rhythm guitar, vocals
- Phil Lesh - bass, vocals
- Bill Kreutzmann - drums
- Mickey Hart - drums
- Ron "Pigpen" McKernan - keyboards, vocals, harmonica, percussion
- Tom Constanten - keyboards
- Keith Godchaux - keyboards
- Donna Jean Godchaux - vocals
- Brent Mydland - keyboards, vocals
- Vince Welnick - keyboards, vocals
- John Oswald - arranger
