Strange Strings (Expanded Edition) vinyl

Fans of Sun Ra's Space Bop and genre-bending jazz were in for a shock with Strange Strings. Even in the eclectic and sometimes baffling Sun Ra catalog, Strange Strings, first issued in 1967, is an outlier. Is it music, or just noise? Or noise as music? John Cage could not be reached for comment. For this album, Sun Ra collected an arsenal of exotic string instruments and handed them out to his Arkestra on the precept that "strings could touch people in a special way." That the Arkestrans didn't know how to play or tune these instruments was not beside the point - it was the point. Ra framed it "a study in ignorance." The result was primitive, yet sophisticated; brutal, yet highly sensitive. Cosmic ignorance being the point of the record, cosmic ignorance is equally, perhaps, *the* point of life; in an era of boundless inquisitiveness, of positivist empiricist searching, of enlightenment venturings-out, it might sometimes be as desirable, as learned or ideal, to endeavour not to know.