First in a proposed 2-disc set, this exercise in "plunderphonics" (as Mr. Oswald refers to his splice- and-dice detournements) provides an hour's worth of fucking "Dark Star" blended into a seamless whole from 51 different performances of the ol' deadhead chestnut from over the past 25 years. Oh boy. Actually, though I personally find the Dead to be about as psychedelic as, say, Canned Heat, this is probably the most appealing GD album I have ever heard. (I remember me and currently absent Toad writer Tom Carter sitting in his dark apartment, LSD coursing through our brains, listening to that one legit live double-LP, shaking our heads and deciding that "somewhere something went wrong" with the whole Dead thing... so we slapped on Miles's Live/Evil and moved ahead with our lives.)* If you're a deadhead, Oswald's remix will certainly appeal... a full hour of groovy noodling fer ya, with temporally liberated layers upon layers of jams seeping in and out of the audioscape. If, however, you're expecting the sort of critical deconstruction Oswald has been known to perform in the past, you'll be quite disappointed (as was Phil Lesh, who commissioned the project). This is an homage, dude, and a better space jam comp by far than Infrared Roses. Rock out.

* Tom has since informed me that he has by dint of unlikely circumstance become a critical, non-deadhead appreciator of the Grateful Dead canon. --K.S.

(first appeared in Reign of Toads #4)

last update 1/17/97

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