Grateful Dead: Ambient 4 – The Plateaux of MIDI

This 100-minute mix compiles 28 space and drums segments from The Grateful Dead’s 1994 Summer Tour. 

These selections previously appeared on my wider-ranging Summer ’94 compilations, which blended them into sequences of regular Dead music. I’ve pulled them together because sometimes you just want to listen to music for spaceports. 

Track titles are the same as on the original comps – to avoid confusion - but otherwise this mix is tagged as an entirely discrete album – to avoid confusion. I’ve added some fades and unified the volume. I created a space disc and a drums disc, but everything should shuffle pretty smoothly, too.

100-minute mp3 mix zipped up here.

This is the fourth mix of this kind of material. The others are:

18 responses
I’ve been waiting for this. Cheers!
Kumori, enjoy!
Looking forward to hearing this and reading all the comments. My MIDI work with the band was full of inspiration as I saw what they did with the sounds I helped design for them.
Bob Bralove, what a cool surprise to hear from you! I hope you DO enjoy it. I am mesmerized by what you gave the band and what they did with it. Thank you!
Hello! I LOVE your mixes here, especially the Ambient '94 Dead mixes. I also really enjoy the Tighten Up mix, the early Mothers of Invention mix, and a bunch of your Shortlist mixes of Dead shows/runs. I'm mostly familiar with '66-'78 Dead, though this is changing thanks to your hard work. After hearing some of your '93 mixes, I was blown away by their MIDI space improvs as well. I'm wondering if you've considered doing another mix of space/drums segments that you like from 1993? I for one, would greatly appreciate another curated Ambient series from you and the boys. I also have a bootleg show by another band from 1975 that you may like to hear/ make a shortlist of, but perhaps that's for e-mail at another time. Thank you for your dedication and generous contributions to all our ears!
Shane, so great to hear how much you dig the Mothers and MIDI stuff! Those are two of my own favorite personal discoveries during my excavations and isolation experiments. I'd love to do a 1993 sometime and have put a few hours aside for later exploration. I'm curious about your 1975 recording! My musical interests are much wider than the blog's output suggests; it all depends on whether there's a bunch of unreleased stuff to dig through!
Not sure how you feel about capital P Prog, but the 1975 show is Gentle Giant playing at Ultrasonic studios for an FM broadcast. I’m not the biggest GG fan, yet this show absolutely RIPS. Like the studio stuff, the lead singing is overall weak, but the instrumental and group vocal work on that show is phenomenal. Over the past decade I have fantasized about editing all the awesome passages into a perfect musical document but have never gotten around to it. I’ll also say- - if you are hesitant or dismissive of the world of ‘70s prog, I highly recommend to you and others to check out any live tapes. Most of these bands suffer from slick and sterile studio production, only to put on some of the best musical
.... performances of all time! (Magma, Gong, King Crimson, Hatfield and the North, Happy the Man)
Shane, I would be very into checking this out and investigating an instrumental approach to it. I don't know GG, so it would be a great way for me to get intimate - and maybe my virginity re the compositions could lead to an interesting place. I haven't been sucked into capital P prog yet. Big Genesis fan from way back, but more of a Crimson, Krautrock guy.
Oh I suspect you would greatly enjoy!!! You can find the GG set on youtube- I have lossy 320 mp3s of that show and some other unreleased live stuff by the above bands if you'd like to check them out
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