I found them the way you find most things worth finding — by accident. Scrolling YouTube, and suddenly there’s Jerry Garcia’s voice riding over a synth bed and a four-on-the-floor kick drum, and I stopped breathing for a second.
The project is called Deadtronica. Aron Magner — the keyboardist from the Disco Biscuits who’s been playing alongside Bill Kreutzmann in Billy & the Kids since 2014 — teamed up with Cloudchord, an Austin-based guitarist and producer named Derek VanScoten whose resume includes an Emmy, a Sundance premiere, and years spent in the chill electronic world making records for labels like Nettwerk and Pretty Lights. Together they’ve done something I didn’t know I needed. They took Jerry’s actual voice — sampled from the original recordings — and built new electronic architecture around it.
Not a cover. Not a tribute. Jerry himself, singing inside music he never heard.
I met Jerry once. I was working at Adolf Gasser’s in San Francisco, solo in the movie room, and he came in to buy a projector. When he paid, he handed me too much cash. I told him. He said no, he didn’t. So I laid the fifty-dollar bills out on the counter and counted them for him. He looked at the money, looked at me, and said whatever — and laughed. He wasn’t annoyed. He was amused. This guy literally could not give two shits about money. Then he gave me a backstage pass to come film them on stage a couple of nights later. Just like that. No big deal, no strings attached. That’s who Jerry was. An open soul. Generous, joyful, playful. A guy who moved through the world without gripping anything too tightly.
I think about that moment now when I hear his voice floating over Magner’s synths. That openness. That looseness. Jerry’s voice worked the same way — it never clenched, never insisted. And that’s exactly why it works in this new context. It was never rigid to begin with.
I need to say something about tribute bands. I respect what they do. Dark Star Orchestra, Joe Russo’s Almost Dead, all of them — they’re skilled musicians honoring the catalog. But I can never fully get there, because the whole time I’m listening I’m thinking: I could just go listen to Jerry. The voice is the thing. That nasal warmth, the way he’d slide into a lyric sideways like he was remembering it in real time. No one else has it. No one can perform it into existence.
So when I heard “West L.A. Fadeaway” reimagined with heavy synths and Jerry’s voice threaded through the middle of it, something clicked that a thousand tribute shows never touched. It wasn’t nostalgia. It was presence. Jerry, present tense, in a room he’d never been in before.
I’ve always had a thing for electronic music meeting the jam world. STS9 opened that door for me years ago — the idea that improvisation and electronic production weren’t enemies but collaborators. Deadtronica takes that premise and raises the stakes by putting Garcia’s voice at the center of it. Magner knows this music in his bones. He’s not a tourist. He spent years on stage with Kreutzmann, which means he’s been inside the Dead’s rhythmic DNA in a way most musicians only dream about. And Cloudchord grew up worshipping Hendrix, studied jazz guitar, toured Brooklyn, and ended up making atmospheric dance music built on live guitar and lap steel. These two didn’t stumble into the Grateful Dead catalog looking for content. They arrived with the credentials and the reverence to pull it off.
Here’s what really gets me, though. What they’re doing reminds me of the early days of sampling — that wild, pre-litigation era when De La Soul could build “3 Feet High and Rising” out of dozens of uncleared samples, when the Beastie Boys could stitch together “Paul’s Boutique” from a patchwork of other people’s records, when the whole idea was that music was a living conversation and every record was fair game for the next one. Nobody was asking permission. Nobody was calling lawyers. You heard something, you grabbed it, you made something new. It was a free-for-all, and it produced some of the most creative, joyful, boundary-dissolving music of the twentieth century.
That era ended, of course. The lawsuits came. Grand Upright Music v. Warner Bros. in 1991 changed everything. Sampling became expensive, then prohibitive, then rare. The conversation got quieter because every word cost money.
What Deadtronica is doing isn’t the free-for-all. They’re going through proper channels — Magner has said publicly that some of their upcoming tracks are waiting on clearance from the rights holders. They’re playing by the rules. But the spirit is the same. The impulse is the same. Take something that already exists, something that carries weight and history and emotional charge, and put it in a new room and see what happens.
And honestly? I think Jerry would be fine with it. More than fine. The guy who laughed off a fistful of extra fifties and handed a stranger a backstage pass was never going to be precious about who got to use his voice. This is the guy whose band not only allowed but encouraged fans to tape their shows — an act so radical in the 1970s and ‘80s that it essentially predicted the open-source ethos decades before the internet made it a philosophy. The Dead understood something that most artists and labels fought against for years: that music gains value by being shared, not hoarded. That the more it circulates, the more alive it stays.
Jerry’s been gone since 1995. Thirty-one years. And in all that time, the tributes and the cover bands and the legacy acts have kept the songs in circulation. But the songs aren’t what I miss. I miss the voice. I miss the way it felt to hear him think out loud inside a melody.
Deadtronica gave that back to me for four minutes on a random afternoon. Jerry’s voice, in a room full of synthesizers, still finding its way into the lyric sideways. Still warm. Still here.
That’s not sampling. That’s resurrection.
“Thumb Out” Book One of my memoir trilogy “The Spaces Between” is available now
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It is glorious to learn your impression of this innovative technique. By the way, my sister who loves your book still remembers with great fondness a Dead concert she attended (or maybe floated above) in Albuquerque😊