What Are You Listening To?

[Tiggi]

One of the staples of live Grateful Dead shows in the early years was the song Dark Star.

It was used as a springboard for their exploratory jams, and became a firm Deadhead favourite. Unfortunately, in their latter years they rationed its' performance pretty heavily.

This 2 disc set (originally released as two separate albums, Transitive Axis, & Mirror Ashes) comprises nothing else but music from live recordings of Dark Star. Although all the music is from the Dead (hence the wordplay title), the credit goes to John Oswald whose input was to trawl through some 40 hours of live recordings, and to construct this work in whichever way he saw fit.

Material from right through the band's career has been used, with sections varying from less than a second to several minutes in length. The different performances are woven together, with some running backwards, some at altered speeds, some treated with echo effects, and numerous other techniques used to create a Dark Star sound collage.

For the most part, this sounds like fairly standard Dead jamming, but it does go seriously weird on the second disc, and starts to sound like some cosmic soundtrack. It's quite possible that this section has been lifted as was from a live performance, since the Dead weren't averse to a bit of weird, on occasion.

I really enjoyed it, but this is for serious Deadheads only.

Allmusic 3/5 & 4/5 stars.