John Oswald
Gray Folded

This is one of the weirder Grateful Dead- related releases on the market. You've probably heard portions of it as well as interviews with John Oswald on David Gans' program. Gray Folded is a two-disk set spanning nearly two hours and covering twenty-five years of the classic Dark Star. What makes this collection so weird is that Oswald, using a process he calls plunderphonics, rolls together many, many version of Dark Star both sequentially and in musical layers. The result is a musical masterpiece, although it does get a bit weird when Garcia's voice is heard singing the word "dark" and holding it for a full minute. The packaging for the set is fantastic, including a description of the creative and technical process and a full mapping in ten-second increments of which versions appear in the mix. ½