{"id":4068,"date":"2025-07-29T15:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-07-29T15:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/john-oswald-turns-the-grateful-deads-dark-star-into-a-black-hole\/"},"modified":"2025-07-29T15:00:00","modified_gmt":"2025-07-29T15:00:00","slug":"john-oswald-turns-the-grateful-deads-dark-star-into-a-black-hole","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/john-oswald-turns-the-grateful-deads-dark-star-into-a-black-hole\/","title":{"rendered":"John Oswald Turns the Grateful Dead\u2019s \u2018Dark Star\u2019 into a Black Hole"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<figure><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/static.spin.com\/files\/2025\/07\/Grayfolded-John-Oswald.png\" width=\"1290\" height=\"1292\" alt=\"John Oswald's 'Grayfolded' is due for release in August.\"><\/figure>\n<p>\u201c\u2018Dark Star\u2019 is always playing somewhere. All we do is tap into it,\u201d Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh supposedly said. <em>Grayfolded<\/em>, John Oswald\u2019s epic collage of the Dead\u2019s hallmark longform jam, assembled from fragments of more than 100 different performances spanning the band\u2019s 30-year career, could be seen as an attempt to simultaneously channel every single version of \u201cDark Star\u201d that\u2019s ever been played or will be played, in every \u201csomewhere\u201d that\u2019s ever existed.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019s the sort of thing that gives copyright lawyers fits. When Lesh invited Oswald to work with the Dead\u2019s catalog in 1994, Oswald was probably most known for his sensibly named 1989 album <em>Plunderphonics<\/em>, which contained a ruthless dissection of Michael Jackson\u2019s \u201cBad\u201d (renamed \u201cDab\u201d), and legally could not be offered for sale under any circumstances. (The lawyers still ensured most of the copies were destroyed anyway.)\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>More from Spin:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>\n\t\t\t<a href=\"https:\/\/www.spin.com\/2025\/07\/ben-nichols-leans-into-poetry-and-his-arkansas-past-on-new-solo-record\/\">Ben Nichols Leans Into Poetry and His Arkansas Past On New Solo Record<\/a>\n\t\t<\/li>\n<li>\n\t\t\t<a href=\"https:\/\/www.spin.com\/2025\/07\/talking-heads-reissue-campaign-offers-more-versions-of-more-songs-about-buildings-and-food\/\">Talking Heads Reissue Campaign Offers More Versions of \u2018More Songs About Buildings and Food\u2019<\/a>\n\t\t<\/li>\n<li>\n\t\t\t<a href=\"https:\/\/www.spin.com\/2025\/07\/eyedress-takes-his-bedroom-pop-into-the-studio\/\">Eyedress Takes His Bedroom Pop into the Studio<\/a>\n\t\t<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\">\n<div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<lite-youtube videoid=\"0V6PKt9RxVU\" style=\"bottom: 0; height: 100%; left: 0; position: absolute; right: 0; top: 0; width: 100%; max-width:100%;\"><\/lite-youtube>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<p>Lesh may have expected Oswald to treat the music of his band in a similarly radical fashion, chopping, blending, and disrupting until the Dead\u2019s byzantine meanderings were disfigured beyond recognition. Instead, Oswald, in true contrarian form, expanded \u201cDark Star,\u201d 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 \u201cDark Star,\u201d and will be until the sun explodes.) And though Oswald tinkered with the basics considerably\u2014the song\u2019s distinctive opening theme becomes more of a transitory motif and is never heard in full, while Jerry Garcia\u2019s vocals are sporadic and greatly altered when they do appear\u2014it\u2019s still very much \u201cDark Star\u201d by the Grateful Dead. Just more so. The sheer maximalism of Oswald\u2019s endeavor makes it tempting to call <em>Grayfolded<\/em> the ultimate \u201cDark Star.\u201d 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 <em>Grayfolded<\/em> 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\u2019s hall of mirrors there emerges a surprisingly coherent vision: \u201cDark Star\u201d 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.<\/p>\n<p>To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.spin.com\/2021\/07\/the-greatest-rock-stars-of-all-time\/?utm_source=yahoo&amp;utm_medium=bottomlink&amp;utm_campaign=yahoolink\">click here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div style=\"margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px;\" class=\"sharethis-inline-share-buttons\" ><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201c\u2018Dark Star\u2019 is always playing somewhere. All we do is tap into it,\u201d Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh supposedly said. Grayfolded, John Oswald\u2019s epic collage of the Dead\u2019s hallmark longform&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1906,2991,24,88],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4068","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-grateful-dead","category-john-osborne","category-pushly","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4068","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4068"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4068\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4068"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4068"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4068"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}