101 STRINGS 'Astro Sounds From Beyond The Year 2000'
Desensitized robots, sitars and the sound of whips…
If you think the original sleeve and the music on this CD are, er, “far out”, just wait till you hear the story of how it was made. This is part of a trilogy of strangeness that involves legendary guitarists, fast-talking record execs, the excess of drugs and the ‘60s flower power generation, space missions, Jane Fonda and a woman who once “made out” with a synth. Read on…
The 101 Strings were a collection of European orchestras employed in the mid-‘60s in their downtime to record porno scores, church hymns, Beatles’ covers and all manner of concepts thought up by Al Sherman of Alshire Records in the States. It was big news in the malls and big sales ensued.
After Sgt Pepper, Sherman and his team wanted to exploit the possibilities of the acid rock fraternity. Enter a shifty bloke with the master tapes of strange psyche noises and some driving rhythms as prepared by various LA session players. Alshire decided to release it, with a suitably trippy name. The Animated Egg was hatched.
The recordings were out takes of as session by The Id from the album ‘The Inner Sounds Of The Id’, a rarer than rare item that still has psyche fans salivating. The guitar was by Jerry Cole – a former surf instrumentalist who’d set the phasers to stun and, with the addition of some strings and a light smattering of sitar courtesy of arranger Monty Kelly the groove was afoot for its new guise.
The album met with some success but the story doesn’t end there. Never ones to miss an opportunity, Alshire decided more could be done with the tapes and set about a third incarnation of the recordings, encouraging Kelly to soup up the sitar and add some groovy organ. The track titles were changed and, as the likes of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Barbarella, starring Jane Fonda, were the thing of the day, a space theme, a futuristic one at that, was concocted and 101 Strings’ ‘Astro-Sounds From Before The Year 2000’ was born.
According to Barry Stoller’s story of the release on the Popmatters website, Al Sherman said later that, "we had many weird albums like Astro Sounds, but got so many letters from the Midwest objecting to the zany formats that we stopped." Shame, there are a good half a dozen versions of this album still to be made.
In the Re/Search book Incredibly Strange Music II, Dead Kennedy’s front man Jello Biafra enthused: “The kings of pseudo-psychedelia have to be Alshire and Somerset who churned out versions of ‘Hair’ and ‘Yellow Submarine’ and the 101 Strings did do ‘Astro-Sounds From Before The Year 2000’, a serious psych-out album with Moog.” He was slightly non-committal about the pedigree of the album but the sleeve alone forced me to buy it when I finally saw it in the now defunct Reckless Records in Soho.
From the first unhinged super echoey phased guitar that opens ‘Flameout’ I wasn’t disappointed. Of the three versions of these recordings, this was the furthest out there. It was off-the-wall. In fact, there was no wall anymore. And, by the time you get to the last two tracks, ‘Whiplash’ and ‘Instant Nirvana’, the plot has long been lost.
By then we’re at a groovy singles party on Mars. There the orchestra are joined by Bebe Bardon who moans through the closing moments much as she did on ‘The Sounds Of Love… A To Zzzz’, which is described on the Internet as the “sound of a woman getting it on with a Moog”. Hey, it was the swinging ‘60s. Anything went…
Without doubt ‘Astro-Sounds’ is one of the strangest listening experiences you’ll ever have and as it’s lush strings fade away, it’s plain to anyone that Bebe enjoyed it too.
1 Flameout 2 Re-Entry To Mog (That’s How It Is) 3 Space Odyssey (Sure Listic) 4 Astral Freakout (A Love Built On Sand) 5 Orbit Fantasy (Inside Looking Out) 6 Blues For The Guru 7 Strings For Ravi 8 Barrier X-69 (Slippin’ And Trippin’) 9 A Disappointed Love With A Desensitized Robot 10 Where Were You In 1982? 11 Trippin’ On Lunar 07 12 A Bad Trip Back In ‘69 13 Karma Sutra 14 Whiplash 15 Instant Nirvana
