Q&A: John Oswald on Plunderphonics, ‘Grayfolded’ and audio collage

Last weekend The Times published a profile of the sound artist John Oswald, who has just released an LP version of “Grayfolded.” The recording, which is a nearly two-hour sound collage of dozens of live versions of the Grateful Dead’s “Dark Star,” was released 20 years ago, and is considered a touchstone of so-called mashup culture. Oswald recently revisited the work to reconfigure it for a deluxe 3-LP version.

Below is an edited transcript of my conversation with Oswald, who spoke from his home of Toronto.

Does it surprise you that 20 years later ‘Grayfolded’ is finally coming out on vinyl?

Well, it doesn’t so much surprise me because I’ve been involved in the whole production of it, and I also had it in mind partly as a result of a few Deadheads and Plunderphonics fans suggesting it over the past year. So I was thinking of possibly doing it on my own about a year ago, and that’s when I heard from Important Records that they were planning on doing it, and that seemed like the best route to take.

Oddly, I learned that ‘Grayfolded’ was being pressed on vinyl while working on a story on Stoughton Printing. The company printed the jackets a few months back, and I saw them fresh off the presses.

That was one of the things that entices me to make reissues of particular things that originally came out on CD as vinyl records. It’s that bigger packaging, which goes back to a thing that I really enjoyed when I was young – the album covers. So the opportunity to do a triple gatefold was extremely enticing.

It didn’t come out on vinyl originally?

It came out on CD in 1994 as a single CD, which was the original plan. It was going to be a CD package but when I discovered in the process of making it that the material was going to go over the maximum length for a CD, we started planning a volume two. Instead of having two separate things – because it really was one piece – we brought out a double CD in 1995, and that was reissued on my label, Fony, in 2004.

Is it on Spotify or other streaming services?

I don’t know, but that brings up an interesting problem with some of my [work], which was designed for CD and transferred to things like Spotify, where there’s the opportunity to buy the whole package or the opportunity to buy single tracks. There’s a lot of -- and “Grayfolded” is an extreme example of -- segues from track to track. There aren’t spaces in between, so when you download a track, if it’s just a transfer from a CD. You’ve got something that cuts off at the end. It never happened with “Grayfolded,” but my “Plunderphonics” CD box release, all the tracks got remastered for iTunes.

[With “Grayfolded”], they have things things called astroludes, which is this one ascending figure that happens in “Grayfolded,” and happens in the Grateful Dead “Dark Star” performances over and over again. These astroludes were always like countdowns, and appeared as countdowns whenever they were in between tracks. If you do a straight transfer, you either get that pegged on to the end of the track, or it just disappears completely. So transferring things to Internet-ready formats, in the case of a lot of my releases, is a whole other job, and transferring the thing from two CD sides to six record sides was similarly a challenge.

How did you resolve that?

Well, that’s something that I never really liked in multi-side performances of things, going right back to the one Grateful Dead record that I bought, which was “Live Dead” when it came out. What it seemed like was, ‘Well, we’ve run out of time, so we’re going to fade.’ And whether you backtrack a little bit [on the next side] to say, ‘This is where you were,’ it doesn’t seem like the only solution. And it didn’t seem like the ideal solution.

So in fact, for the five transitions on the “Grayfolded” LP set, there’s a different treatment for each ending of a side. That was the major thing in remastering and transferring it for record, was really designing the sides.

A large chunk of material from the second CD – the whole thing is called “Mirror Ashes” – it’s too large movements, “Transitive Axis” and “Mirror Ashes” – has been moved to the end of the piece, and another chunk moved into the middle, because it worked better on LP than on CD. So it’s a really different experience.

So you went in and adapted the piece itself?

Yeah. I didn’t want something that sounded like we’d managed to cram the CD onto here and you’ve got your nice packaging, but it was originally designed for CD. I wanted something that worked as these approximately 20-minute chunks. It becomes a six-part thing rather than a two-part thing.

Somewhat to my surprise, I prefer this six-part thing to the two-part thing. And that goes back, I guess, to my early listening experiences, which was almost entirely on LP. I didn’t buy many 45s in the 60s, listening to things in 15-20-minute chunks, and listening to albums that had some kind of overall design. Applying that same time scale to reediting the “Grayfolded” material, it both made sense and it was a challenge. And for me what came out is better than the original.

Where were you in your creative life when you first started working on ‘Grayfolded’? Was this your first long-form piece?

At the time it would have seemed atypical among Plunderphonics releases because there’s a tendency when I take an existing piece of music and redo something the ending result is hopefully something succinct. And as a result they tended to be shorter. The material I was using I tended to compress and condense. But I’d been experimenting a lot with large scale-things, like taking symphonies and slowing them way down to last eight hours. A lot of stuff didn’t come out because there just wasn’t the ideal medium for it to come out as a product that you could send around. But were interesting as installations.

I guess I tend to be an extremist, so I would make very long things and I would make very short things. “Grayfolded” was one of those longer things.

Is this the first time you’d revisited ‘Grayfolded’ since you finished it?

Unlike most people in interviews I read, I do tend to listen to my old stuff. The 105 minutes of “Grayfolded” isn’t something I listen to straight through very often, so it’s possible that I hadn’t listened to the whole thing as an entity since 1995, but I’ve definitely listened to bits of it on various occasions.

I know there was at least one occasion of a “live” performance of “Grayfolded,” where I had somebody else who was shooting it around to various multispeaker theaters.

When revisiting it, did you find things that you would have done differently?

A few little things. But if there were, I changed them. But by and large I think – I only now remember one – I feel like there were two sections that I felt just went on for too long, so I did a bit more of what I’ve described as the whole process of this, which is folding. I didn’t get rid of the material, but I folded it upon itself. It just got a bit denser, and a bit more interesting in a couple of parts. The overall length of the three LPs is a bit shorter than the two CDs, but all the material is still there.

What kind of interactions with Dead fans have you had over the years?

It comes up all the time. It’s become a bit more of a rarity now, and it’s partly based on the fact that I do this less, but for a while I was getting a lot of invitations for speaking engagements that were more often than not in institutions of higher learning, to just come in and do a guest lecture.

I found it interesting to ask if there were any Deadheads in the audience among these lectures, and there would always be at least one. That becomes less of a case now. Quite often no one puts their hand up in the crowd. But nonetheless there’s a steady stream of traffic among people who seem to be interested in this material, and the CD keeps selling.

In the time since you started working in sound manipulation and collage, a whole world has opened up. Do you find that gratifying or frustrating, that it’s so easy to achieve similar results using what was formerly a more complicated process?

One thing that happens is I end up doing less of it. A lot of the work I’ve done is based on being curious as to what happens when you do this. And now there’s a greater likelihood that I can find somebody else that’s already tried that out and I can just grab it and listen to it without having to go through the process of creating something.

And part of my curiosity is, “If I did this, how do people react?” Particularly that transformation of something that’s familiar and that back in the ‘70s was seen as sacrosanct. Before, say, the mid-’80s there really wasn’t such thing as a remix. There was one version of a song – and maybe a radio version – but otherwise it usually wasn’t transformed in any way – with the exception of dub culture in Jamaica.

It was really interesting to say, “Well, what if I do change this? How do people react to something that’s familiar but that’s been changed?” Now that’s a question I don’t have to ask. That transformation, and the many facets of any particular manifestation of an audio artwork, are just everywhere.

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