Astro Sounds From Beyond The Year 2000 is the holy grail of 101 Strings Orchestra releases. After years of searching, hoping, dreaming and digging, I finally possess one. It’s not particularly rare, but certainly the most expensive and I had not laid eyes upon one ever… until I paid a guy $10 in Dunsmuir, CA.
It goes for $50-100 on discogs. It was sampled often by hip-hop/dance producers in the early days of sampling and is a candidate for most interesting and coolest of all the 101 Strings releases. I’ll have to update this later with info on the music itself. It’s basically rock tracks lifted from another band – The Electric Egg – with a few syrupy strings overdubbed on top. Coolest of all, my wife’s ears perk up when I play this one – she likes it! – that rarely happens otherwise, lol.
The fellow that sold it to me felt it was in poor condition, thus the low price. I have far worse than that sitting on the shelf though! I was thrilled to finally own one and at a reasonable price. But I kinda think I deserved it!
Finally!
Now, I’m on the home stretch, with only 75-100 releases left to go. (75 if it’s Somerset/Alshire only, another 25 are on other labels.)
I find 101 Strings albums all the time. Are there any in particular you’re looking for? I used to hunt them down for a friend of mine who collected them, but he has all but one of two.
Thanks for the offer! If you check out this post – https://www.thriftstore-vinyl.com/101-strings-phase-1-is-done/ – you’ll see I finally finished what I consider Phase 1 of collecting them all. That’s the full Somerset and Alshire catalogs. There are more than a few of them that are very difficult to come across in the wild or even for sale online. Phase 2 is collecting all the non-US releases but I’m putting that on hold until I can visit Europe or win the lottery. I wonder how many your friend has, it’s seems like there is always one more to acquire. My current estimate is about 400+ vinyl releases worldwide to collect and I have 367.