I am grateful to Bubba Ayoub (@otdispace) for permission to share his mesmerizing ambient/noise Grateful Dead remix album.
Ayoub is a modular synthesizer performer and builder, and a lightshow artist. I suspect he is also the world’s leading expert on/appreciator of the Phil Lesh/Ned Lagin “Seastones” project from the mid-1970s, which contributes to this remix album. If “Seastones” has eluded you, so far, track 3 on Ayoub’s album might be what you need.
Ayoub’s Dead reprocessing aligns directly with my own fascination with the band’s 1990s MIDI explorations and the band’s lifelong resonance with avant garde music, including Eno, Budd, Hassell, Frith, Krautrock, etc. If the Dead had addressed their weirdest recordings the same way those artists did, they might have produced documents like Ayoub’s remixes.
Ayoub is active on many creative fronts:
Check out this live synthesizer rooftop concert video on Youtube.
View Ayoub’s lightshow work on Instagram @juggableoffense
Or just give thanks that someone is doing Ayoub’s day job, building badass synthesizers at STG Soundlabs.
Regarding the Dead appropriations and mutations on this mix, Ayoub explains: “I'm done being frustrated by the lack of completely buckshitfuckwild official releases in the vein of ‘Grayfolded’ and ‘Infrared Roses,’ and that's the driving force behind the Grateful Dead-adjacent portions of the “Lost in Space Tapes.”
63-minute"Lost in Space: The Derelict" mp3 album zipped up here. Ayoub’s track-by-track notes, below.
1. Your Zones Are Short (24:27)
Drums and or Space and or BEAM from 083178, Egypt 78, 072988, 062694, 041882, 041982. Seastones from 071974 and 102074. Two June 68 Feedback segments provide some extreme noise, and finally littered throughout are bits and pieces of the 012278 Close Encounters Jam.
This was the sort of test case for cramming in as many of these little nuggets of weird Dead as possible onto a cassette 4-track to create a way of exploring a kind of econo plunderphonics.
2. All Your Zones R Belong To Us (7:23)
Combines a bass/drums jam from 062273 with various Seastones in a sort of reimagining of what Seastones could have been had the stars aligned differently.
3. Seazzzones (24:23)
Combines every Seastones from the October 1974 Winterland run. This is where I wanted to end up once I got the idea to plunderphonicize as much weird Dead as I could get my hands on.
I was listening to a version of Seastones and reviewing it on Twitter one afternoon and I tweeted out something to the effect of "jeez, I wish this was just drenched in reverb and delay" to which Jesse Jarnow responded "why don't you just do that to it yourself?" I ran with the idea and immediately knew I wanted to try layering Seastones.
There's a lot of dead air in Seastones performances, so putting them on top of each other helped me create a more cohesive, all consuming mass of sound that doesn't recreate the experience of perceiving all those strange frequencies beyond the human range of hearing but does hit the listener's perception centers with less "what the fuck were they doing up there in the 16 second pause between one blip and the next?"
4. Out of Pocket Guest Spot Zones (7:36)
This tape combines a bunch of Space segments with special guests - the Guyto Monks and Edie Brickell specifically, as their appearances with the Dead are my favorite guest appearances. Long story short I just think it's real cool when people join in on the one truly, fully improvised vintage psychedelia moment in every Dead show so I wanted to see what it was like when I put a bunch of them together.
Cover art by Ruth Poland adapted from a Seastones concert poster