Flashback at 60: Grateful Dead - Grayfolded (1996)
Editor’s note: The year 2025 marks the 60th anniversary of the Grateful Dead’s birth. This is the 30th Flashback on 60, a periodic feature in which Sound Bites revisits the band’s career.
A radical concept aimed at an audience fond of radical musical ideas, Grayfolded is nevertheless a niche LP.
Armed with 100 versions of “Dark Star” the Grateful Dead performed between 1968 and 1993, producer John Oswald sampled, remixed and layered the archival recordings to come up with two, one-hour sequences released as Transitive Axis and Mirror Ashes in 1994 and ’95, respectively. They were subsequently reissued together as Grayfolded in ’96.
The novelty of potentially hearing keyboardist Tom Constanten (1968-1970) alongside Bruce Hornsby (1990-’92) - the soundscapes are so dense, it’s impossible to know - is negated by Oswald’s decision to eliminate virtually all melody and rhythm in favor of sonic chaos, through which the “Dark Star” theme swirls, emerging and dissipating across such tracks as “Clouds Cast,” “The Phil Zone,” “Recedes (While We Can),” and “73rd Star Bridge Sonata.”
While the music is challenging and only occasionally satisfying, it’s the remixed and manipulated vocals that sink the project. They sound like something a house-music deejay might deploy.
Oswald deserves credit for taking big chances with the music of a band of iconoclastic risk-takers. And while most will likely think Grayfolded didn’t work out, some will surely revel in its anti-musicality.
Read Sound Bites’ previous Flashback on 60 items here.
11/9/25
