Grateful Dead

Grayfolded is a two-CD album produced by John Oswald featuring the Grateful Dead song "Dark Star". Using over a hundred different performances of the song, recorded live between 1968 and 1993, Oswald, using a process he calls "plunderphonics", built, layered, and "folded" all of them to produce two large, recomposed versions, each about one hour long.

Only the second major career-spanning retrospective of the Dead, The Best of the Grateful Dead - released in the spring of 2015, just before a series of farewell shows in the summer - takes advantage of the extra disc 2003's The Very Best of Grateful Dead lacked. Weighing in at 32 tracks - a full 16 cuts longer than Very Best - The Best of the Grateful Dead also follows a strict chronological sequence, so it takes a little while for the psychedelic haze to lift and the Dead to settle into the rangy, rootsy groove that characterized so much of their existence - right around "St. Stephen" and "China Cat Sunflower," both from 1969's Aoxomoxoa. From there, many - but by no means all - of the group's warhorses are marched out, all in their studio incarnations…

It only seems like there has been an endless stream of Grateful Dead compilations. In reality, there has only been a handful, and the most notable of those were released while the band was still an active recording and touring unit in the '70s – and before they had belated chart success in the late '80s, 20 years after their debut album. So, Warner/Rhino's 2003 collection The Very Best of Grateful Dead marks the first attempt to do a thorough single-disc overview of the group's career, encompassing not just their classic Warner albums but also the records they cut for their own Grateful Dead/UA and Arista.