Ostertag released Attention Span in 1990, featuring Frith on guitars and John Zorn on saxophone. His experiences in El Salvador led to his composition Sooner or Later, a musique concréte tour de force made from a recording of a young boy burying his father in El Salvador. The German newspaper Die Zeit said, "Bob Ostertag did not simply create a political piece but a musical reality, in which sampling technology is used in a significant way for the first time. The music encircles reality, decomposes it into music and recomposes it until reality is no longer able to escape. It is this clarity that makes Sooner or Later great music, a music that has something to do with life again." In 1992, The Kronos Quartet commissioned a new work from Ostertag. This commission produced the landmark work All the Rage. Ostertag composed the piece using a recording of the AB101 Veto Riot in San Francisco. Ostertag originally conceived the composition as a collaboration with writer/painter/photographer/film maker David Wojnarowicz, but David was ill with AIDS. When David died before the collaboration could take place, Ostertag made a second, solo piece from the riot recordings, Burns Like Fire, and dedicated it to Wojnarowicz. The cover art was a Wojnarowicz painting. The Kronos Quartet presented the world premiere of All the Rage at Lincoln Center in 1993. New York Times critic Bernard Holland wrote: "Bob Ostertag’s All the Rage turned the evening on its head with a devastating roar of gay anger. Of recent concert pieces having to do with AIDS, All the Rage seems by far the most powerful example. Mr. Ostertag’s stern, purifying gaze has swept away the sentimentality and melodrama that have compromised more famous compositions in the genre." In 1993 The Kronos Quartet released All the Rage as a CD under the same title. Once again, the cover art was a Wojnarowicz painting. Ostertag went on to compose Spiral, setting to music the last writing of David Wojnarowicz. In the text, Wojnarowicz describes experiencing his own dying as turning into glass. Ostertag composed the work for a chamber ensemble of glass instruments he commissioned from Oliver DiCicco. Many of the instruments were destroyed in transit after a performance in Switzerland, so Spiral was never recorded. In 1993, Ostertag formed a quartet with vocalist Phil Minton, bassist Mark Dresser, percussionist Gerry Hemingway. The music was composed using a novel method: