For die-hard Grateful Dead fans – the so-called “Deadheads” – few things carried more weight than a live performance of the legendary »Dark Star«. Rarely included in setlists, the song’s modest, three-minute 1968 studio version would, when played live, regularly transform into a sprawling vessel of improvisation. The longest known rendition clocks in at 46 minutes – a psychedelic voyage through time and tone.
Before remixing had emerged as a genre in its own right, Canadian composer John Oswald developed a method in the mid-1980s he called Plunderphonics: a radical re-assembly of existing music through sampling, layering, and deep structural manipulation. In the 1990s, the Grateful Dead’s own label commissioned him to reinterpret »Dark Star«. More than 100 live recordings of the track, spanning from 1968 to 1993, became raw material for a work as conceptual as it is sonically lavish: Oswald sliced, stretched, stacked, and collaged fragments of these performances into a 105-minute-long opus – spread across six LP sides.
The result: Grayfolded – an interstellar space-rock symphony in which Jerry Garcia’s recognisable riffs and licks collide with drones, ambient textures, and feedback storms. At times, the original song is almost unrecognisable; then suddenly, a familiar melody will flicker through. This is not an attempt to document a moment, but rather to distil a myth. Grayfolded becomes a time capsule of collective consciousness, drifting ever deeper into psychedelic parallel worlds with every passing note.
