Strange Strings

“I’m painting pictures of things I know about, and things I’ve felt, that the world just hasn’t had the chance to feel... I’m painting pictures of another plane of existence, you might say, of something that’s so far away that it seems to be nonexistent. I’m painting pictures of that, but it is a world of happiness which people have been looking for or say they wanted, but they haven’t been able to achieve it.” -Sun Ra, interviewed by Henry Dumas in 1966

"...all this considered, Strange Strings, the culmination of all Sun Ra’s string studies, is without doubt one of Sun Ra’s master works. Strange Strings, standing squarely alongside Sun Ra’s other epics of the mid 1960s, Atlantis and Magic City, absolutely shines as his most painterly of expositions in its surface richness and play with deep space and coloration. He has offered no world more strange than this in his entire output as a composer and orchestrator. These explorations are only hinted at in scattered moments on other recordings from this period. The full exercise of his very original and very imaginative powers as musical adventurer and visionary bursts forth in the masterful cosmic clattering of Strange Strings." - Hal Rammel, 2006