gdead.berkeley.edu/gdead.berkeley.edu.tar/gdead.berkeley.edu/pub/gdead/interviews/grey.folded.interview

Internet Message Format | 1994-12-20 | 7KB

From [e-mail] Mon Nov  7 07:24:45 PST 1994
From: [e-mail] (David Gans)
Newsgroups: rec.music.gdead
Subject: Interview with John Oswald about GREY FOLDED
Date: 28 Oct 1994 18:13:01 GMT
Organization: The Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, Sausalito, CA
Lines: 128
Message-ID: <38revd$[e-mail]>
NNTP-Posting-Host: well.sf.ca.us

 Phil Lesh reminds us that Gray Folded is a John Oswald record, not a
 Grateful Dead record.  John Oswald is a composer who often uses
 existing recordings as raw materials.

  Here are a couple of excerpts from our October 3 interview:

  DG: Gray Folded seems to me as though you atomized Dark Star through
  the ages and broke it up into many, many, many small parts and then
  put them back together into a composite Dark Star, which in theory is
  exactly what I expected you to do, but in practice appears to have
  become sort of a homogenized Dark Star in a way, and has lost a lot
  of its contour.

  It reminds me of that Talking Heads album cover in which Polaroids
  were taken of the small regions of the bodies and faces of those
  people and then laid out together into a big screen or on the floor
  or something.  So you got a composite photograph of Talking Heads,
  but composed of all these little segments.  Sort of a pixilated
  version of the Grateful Dead.

  JO:  I don't hear it that way, although I do see the Talking Heads
  cover that way, and it may be because of your great depth and
  knowledge and familiarity with the source material and my relative
  lack of depth and familiarity with that source material, although
  I've heard the source material a lot of times now, so I know what it
  sounded like before I got my hands on it.

  The effect I get from the Talking Heads cover is what I think anybody
  gets.  Hey, there's a whole pile of photographs that they've stuck
  together so you can see that these little bits of the body that
  they've pictured compose this whole person.  So in 50 photographs, I
  can see the whole person.  If I look at one photograph, I see a part
  of a foot. Another photograph, I see a hand.  But your first reaction
  is, "Oh this isn't just a photograph of somebody.  This is a
  composite of a whole pile of photographs."

  Gray Folded is that.  It is a composite of parts of Dark Star. To
  take the analogy further, here's the hand of Dark Star, here's the
  ear of Dark Star.  And let's make this other version of Dark Star
  from all these little bits.  But for me, that sense upon first
  hearing of "Oh yeah, this is made up of little bits" is not there.
  I've tried to not show you the technique and show you were the lines
  are, where the borders are.  I've tried to make something so smooth
  that you first look at it and say, "Oh yeah, this is a recording of
  Dark Star."

  DG:  What would have been equally interesting in the case of the
  Talking Heads would have been to take that stack of Polaroids and
  make one com- posite person from the four different people shots.

  JO:  That's what I would have done.



  DG: I think that the place where it runs afoul of my sensibilities is
  that you pretty much atomized it to the submelodic level and very
  often the grander, spontaneous structures of Dark Star sort of
  disappear into this template of Dark Star that you created - which
  has its own validity of course, but...

  JO:  Well, I'm glad to hear that, because I haven't heard too many
  comments along those lines.  I was expecting to hear that sort of
  thing.  Part of my pleasure in taking this project on is that I knew
  I'd be presenting something to a large body of people who have a
  really particular, intensive interest in a particular piece of music,
  and that's something that's fairly rare in the pop world.  Usually
  all of the attention, adulation of pop stars has to do with what kind
  of clothing they wear or something.

  . . . I knew that I was making something that was not, let's say an
  orthodox structure of Dark Star.  And if you get into looking at those
  microscopic details, it's not a possible version - it's not a
  performably possible version of Dark Star.  You can't have six
  live-performed Jerry Garcias who span 25 years in age.  But the
  thing that interested me about the hundred Dark Stars that I went
  through, the ones that were in the vault, were that each piece had
  exceptions to these rules that would make an orthodox Dark Star.
  There's always something that happened that hadn't happened before,
  which always happens in improvisation.  But the thing that fascinated
  me was how exceptional those exceptions might be - how weird or
  sometimes how normal but unprecedented a certain thing they would do
  would be in a particular version.

  DG:  You mean in the sense of being characteristic and entirely
  unique at the same time?

  JO:  Not necessarily characteristic.  But the uniqueness was
  important.  So I took selections from these things.  I didn't copy
  all of the 100 versions in the vaults.  I took the things that I
  thought would be useful for the project I was working on.  And the
  things I really focused on were the things that made a particular
  performance noticeably different from all of the other performances.
  I knew fairly early on that I'd be trying to make this Dark Star that
  focused on the exceptions rather than the rules.  So I've made a very
  unorthodox Dark Star.

  I haven't tried to submerge the actual performances under a lot of
  tech- nique. I've tried to let the performances still speak for
  themselves.  It's in a fairly complex jungle of a structure, but that
  structure is something that I think you don't hear unless you listen
  really closely.  There's this illusion of this being the Grateful
  Dead playing in concert, and hopefully that illusion can be accepted
  and then it's more fun to explore, imagining it.

  When you get down to it, no recording is what it seems to be. There
  aren't people inside your speakers making noises and singing songs.
  It's paper cones vibrating and all those obvious things.  But a lot
  of music is successful from creating these illusions of things that
  have happened.  And all studio recordings have a lot of artifice
  involved in making those illusions.  You know, the performers
  perhaps didn't play together on the same day, but there can be that
  sense of here's a band playing together.

  I'm using a lot of those standard studio techniques, like again that
  idea of them not playing together on the same day.  Tthat the whole
  group is not playing together on the same day as this other mirror
  image of the whole group playing the same or similar stuff.  One can
  be the group in '92, one can be the group in '67, and they're playing
  at the same time, and in certain passages, when there's that kind
  of nebulous feel to the way they're playing the music, there can be
  this sense that oh yeah, there's 12 people in the band, there's not
  six people in the band.  And those illusions of reality are a big
  part of making this fantasy, this large and unusual Dark Star.

--
    David Gans       [e-mail]           [e-mail]
    Truth and Fun, Inc., 484 Lake Park Ave #102, Oakland CA 94610