Synthedelia: Psychedelic Electronic Music in the 1960s

“Rock & roll is electronic music – because if you pull the plug, it stops.”

So says Louis “Cork” Marcheschi of Fifty Foot Hose, whose sole album, Cauldron – a pioneering collision of abstract electronics and psychedelic rock originally released in 1967 – was reissued for the first time on vinyl at the end of 2017.

Marcheschi’s remark is a reissue too, in a way. He originally made that assertion early in ’67 when he and guitarist David Blossom were drunkenly hatching the idea for Fifty Foot Hose, as a rock group that “really incorporated the concepts of electronic music not as sound effects but as a substantive part of the music.”

Fifty Foot Hose weren’t the only ’60s rockers who’d had this lightbulb moment. Although these bands were largely unaware of each other’s existence at the time, you could group Fifty Foot Hose among a confederacy of acid-era bands from North America who embraced synthesizers and musique concrète’s tape-manipulation techniques. Silver Apples and United States of America have long been cult groups, but there’s also lesser-known exponents of the style, such as the Canadian trio Syrinx (and its avant-garde precursor Intersystems), Lothar and the Hand People, Beaver & Krause and Tonto’s Expanding Head Band. Since retroactively invented genres are all the rage these days – nobody at the time talked about minimal synth, or freakbeat, or junkshop glam – it’s tempting to float a comprehensive coinage. Synthedelia, anybody?

So, what defines this quasi-genre? First, the shared approach to electronics was abstract and sound-painterly, often utilizing hand-made electronic instruments. Second, most of these outfits had a direct connection to the ’60s avant-garde, with one foot planted in psychedelic rock and the other either in the realm of academic composition or in the Fluxus-style underground of multimedia happenings.

Finally, nearly all of these groups released just one or two albums before disbanding. Unlike in Europe, where synths were incorporated into progressive music and long careers in electronic trance-rock were spawned, the innovations of Fifty Foot Hose, Intersystems and the rest simply didn’t take in the American musical soil. None of the synthedelic groups became a US counterpart to Tangerine Dream or Kraftwerk. Their records survive as curios time-stamped with period charm as well as heralds of a future that never came, offering a tantalizing sense of what might have been.

Fifty Foot Hose

Cork Marcheschi’s electronic odyssey began at the age of 17, when his girlfriend played him Edgard Varèse’s “Poème électronique” on the family’s high-end hi-fi. “We were lying there on the carpet in front of a very large cabinet speaker stereo system,” Marcheschi recalls of this initiation, which took place in his Bay Area suburban hometown of Burlingame in 1962. “I had Jeannie run through the piece two or three times because I could feel it more than hear it. I could actually see the sounds – I’ve always thought of ‘Poème électronique’ as an audio sculpture.”

Even more mind-blowing was the 16mm movie that Jeannie’s father – an engineer infatuated with the latest gadgets – had made of the family’s visit to the Philips Pavilion, a jaggedly futuristic construction at the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels. Sponsored by the electronics giant Philips, this collaboration between Varèse, fledgling composer Xenakis, modernist architect Le Corbusier and filmmaker Philippe Agostini was a temporary temple to the 20th century gods of science and technology. The Pavilion was designed as an immersive audiovisual experience: “Poème électronique” and Xenakis’s “Concrete PH” were fed through 325 small speakers distributed throughout the building, while a series of sombre photographic stills chronicled mankind’s journey from prehistoric tribes to the nuclear mushroom cloud. “The whole thing turned me on to what art could be,” says Marcheschi now. The experience propelled him not just towards his electronic rock experiments with Fifty Foot Hose, but into a passion for kinetic art, as pioneered by Jean Tinguely, Vassilakis Takis, Len Lye and others.

The rock half of the Fifty Foot Hose equation came from another profoundly formative experience, when as a young boy he witnessed the fervour of an all-black Baptist church. “That church, it felt like it was ready to explode – they had a drummer, a Hammond B3 organ, tambourines and a choir, and they were just rocking out. The hairs stood up on the back of my neck.” This rhythm & blues baptism sent him in search of records that had the same “mesmerizing effect,” and then made him want to make the electrifying music himself.

By the mid-’60s Marcheschi was the bassist in a band earning a good living playing five nights a week at Bay Area clubs, and that then graduated to the big time at Las Vegas nightspots such as El Rancho and the Pussycat A Go Go. But it was during a stint in Stephanie and Her Boyfriends, a vanity project built around the daughter of a prominent figure in the musician’s union, that Marcheschi met guitarist David Blossom. After a gig, over several beers, they conceived the idea of a band that fused rock and the ideas of the post-WW2 musical vanguard: “I was telling David about George Antheil, Varèse, John Cage.”

The core of Fifty Foot Hose was Marcheschi, Blossom and the latter’s wife Nancy, a singer whose background – folk and the great American songbook of show tunes – supplied a piercingly pure vocal presence, akin to Grace Slick’s in Jefferson Airplane. Much of Cauldron does sound like the San Francisco acid-rock spread by the Airplane, Country Joe & the Fish and others. But there’s a mind-bending hallucinatory element added in the mix: swoops and smears of abstract electronic sound. Unlike most early deployments of synthesizers in rock, Marcheschi’s squeaks and bubblings weren’t decorative overlays – they churned right in the thick of the jam. “Because I’d been playing with musicians for years, it was very easy to just drop into the music – to hear what’s being played and participate with it, not just sprinkle chocolate jimmies on the top.”

Although various established rock bands were getting access to the early modular synthesisers, Fifty Foot Hose built their own sound-generating contraptions. Marcheschi says that wasn’t because they were young unknowns with few resources and no connections, but rather a conscious choice: “We had the opportunity to use the Moog or the Buchla, but David and I just decided not to – we didn’t want to use somebody else’s instrument.” Instead, they built a nameless assemblage that “looked like a coffin – a six-foot-long plywood box with three audio generators screwed into it. Built into the surface was a thing we called the Squeaky Box, because it sounded like you were torturing mice. And there were several sirens, whose wires we’d moved around until they ended up being like ring modulators – dirty ring modulators. We would run one thing into the next into the next into the next, and then put the signal through this beautiful Swiss-engineered tape-loop reverb unit called the Echolette, and out into the audience.”

Fifty Foot Hose’s noise-making arsenal also included a theremin and “a cardboard tube that was twelve feet long that we mic’ed and used to beat with drumsticks.” Blossom’s Gretsch Viking guitar was sonically augmented, using components bought at Radio Shack and eased under the guitar’s pick guard. “There was a grounding screw that, when David hit it, would pick up incoming airplanes at San Francisco International Airport! Sometimes in the middle of a song he’d put his finger on the screw and you’d hear pilots talking back and forth or the people at the control tower laughing.”

Live, an array of visual gimmicks intensified the disorientation. Marcheschi used an electric grinder to shoot sparks into the audience. He’d fill an upside-down, heavy-duty speaker with ball bearings that would trampoline off the vibrating diaphragm, vault five inches into the air and seem to “freeze” when caught in the flicker of a strobe light. A regular stage stunt involved a photographer’s dark-room clock that would be triggered for one minute, during which the band would instantly stop playing and engage in random surrealistic acts before restarting the song in perfect time when the minute was up.

During the acid-rock gold rush of 1967, major labels swooped into San Francisco and signed everything that moved. Limelight, a jazz label in the process of transforming itself into a budget-priced home for the electronic avant-garde, scooped up Fifty Foot Hose. Recorded at the Bay Area’s first eight-track studio, Cauldron combined acid-folk songcraft with anything-goes experimentation. The high point is the title track, a full-blown musique concrète soundscape daubed with psychedelic word-salad from Nancy Blossom and “guest weeping” courtesy of some students from St. Mary’s College, who happened to be visiting the studio with a view to renting it for their choir. “We just grabbed them and said, ‘Would you girls mind crying and wailing like you’re witches behind a big cauldron like in Shakespeare?’” says Marchesi. “Meanwhile I was bonging away on this big chrome ashtray.”

Cauldron came out to bemused reviews. San Francisco pundit Ralph J. Gleason, for instance, couldn’t decide whether Fifty Foot Hose were “immature or premature”: years ahead of their time, or simply undeveloped. The lukewarm reception for the debut was one factor contributing to the group’s brief lifespan, with barely a year elapsing between conception and collapse. When the opportunity came for the Blossoms to join the cast of Hair, they jumped at it. Cork, for his part, decided to finish graduate school, moved to Minneapolis to take up a teaching job and threw his energy into a burgeoning career as a kinetic sculptor.

Intersystems

As Fifty Foot Hose petered out, the Toronto-based Intersystems were gearing up to release the satirically-titled Free Psychedelic Poster Inside, their third album in a little over a year. The group functioned less like a rock band and more like an experimental arts laboratory, in the business of building multimedia environments whose components included sound, poetry, kinetic sculpture and architecture. John Mills-Cockell, the Intersystems member largely responsible for the electro-sonic component of these “experiences,” would later go on to form Syrinx, a trio whose two albums command a unique place in the synthedelic canon.

Like Cork Marcheschi, Mills-Cockell underwent a Damascene moment with electronic music at a tender age. When he was 15 he spent some months in London, working in the music department of Harrods by day and immersing himself in the city’s cultural riches by night. It was during a concert at the Royal Albert Hall – part of the annual Proms series dedicated to classical music – that he first heard the new music being made using electronics and tape-editing. It wasn’t Karlheinz Stockhausen’s “Studie No. 1,” as advertised in the program, but Hugh Le Caine’s 1955 piece “Dripsody,” substituted at the last minute because the Stockhausen recording hadn’t arrived from Germany. A brief example of musique concrète – “Dripsody” is a gorgeous one-and-half-minute miniature sourced entirely from the sound of a single drop of water – the composition blew Mills-Cockell’s mind: “When I heard it, I just went, ‘That’s what I want to do!” He was also struck by the fact that Le Caine was a Canadian composer. Ironically, Mills-Cockell had to travel across the Atlantic to discover the native avant-garde of his homeland.

Within a few years Mills-Cockell arrived at the University of Toronto to study under Myron Schaefer, the head of the electronic music department. He also became involved in the development of an electronic composition syllabus at another Toronto music institution, the Royal Conservatory. Uniquely, this course was open to people who weren’t at the university. Among the members of the general public who joined the first class were three young men who would become collaborators: Michael Hayden and Blake Parker, soon to be his accomplices in Intersystems, and Alan Wells, the future drummer in Syrinx.

“Michael Hayden had been looking for someone to put poetry to these kinetic sculptures he’d been making, and he found Blake Parker,” Mills-Cockell remembers. “But the two of them wanted to go further in terms of techniques for recording the voice and incorporating electronics. So that’s why they signed up for this class at the Royal Conservatory.” Hayden was then asked to contribute a presentation to a 1967 event at the University of Toronto called Perception 67. “Mike wanted to build – inside a large hall – a series of rooms that each had a different sensory quality to them.” He asked Mills-Cockell to record soundtracks, incorporating Parker’s spoken-word element, for each room. Dik Zander, the fourth member of what would become Intersystems, was recruited to help Hayden construct the rooms.

Mind Excursion, as the installation was titled, was like a psychedelic-era update of the Philips Pavilion, with a modish emphasis on sense-activation and “total experience.” “The amount of press it generated was mind-blowing,” says Mills-Cockell. “Journalists loved it – it had a hook for them. At that point, the whole of idea of psychedelia was very hot.” After this success, the four men formally took on the Intersystems name and created a series of happenings and environments. The culmination came 18 months later in Montreal with the ambitious Mind Excursion Center, a series of ten rooms, each with different lighting and fabric schemes to create a tactile environment: “One would be all carpet, another would be totally pitch-black except for explosions of light. There was a water room, a chocolate room and a room that was all mirrorized. Each room had a different soundtrack. And then Blake recited this amazing futuristic soap opera poem – about the romance between two kids called Gordy and René – that tracked the action and the nature of each room.”

It was during those intervening 18 months that Intersystems recorded three albums in rapid succession. For the 1967 debut, Number One Intersystems, “We didn’t have a synthesizer, so we built our own electronic instruments,” says Mills-Cockell. Like Fifty Foot Hose, Intersystems constructed a large box-shaped instrument, which they dubbed the Coffin. “It was this five-foot-long board with strings strung along that you could pluck and hit. There was a box lined with purple satin fabric and the board sat on that. Underneath the purple fabric were concealed switches that allowed us to switch the sound between different pickups along the board and out to different speakers in the hall where we were playing.”

By the second album, Peachy, which was released the same year, Mills-Cockell had got his hands on a Moog, which would become his primary instrument going forward. There was one more Intersystems album, Free Psychedelic Poster Inside, and then the members drifted off into other projects, with Mills-Cockell bringing his intricately shaded style of Moog-play to two Canadian post-psychedelic rock groups, Hydro Electric Streetcar and Kensington Market. It was during the recording of the latter’s second album, Aardvark, that producer Felix Pappalardi spotted Mills-Cockell’s subtle way with a synth and offered to fund a solo album. When saxophonist Douglas Prindle and percussionist Alan Wells joined him, the project turned into 1970’s self-titled debut album by Syrinx.

The sound the trio developed was unlike anything else from the first decade of rock’s interactions with electronics: a sort of avant-chamber-pop whose musky and piquant sourness of tone is steeped in non-Western influences. “Doug and Alan and I all loved listening to music from different parts of the world,” says Mills-Cockell. “Doug learned tabla and sitar, Alan was studying voodoo drumming. It was part of our daily practice as musicians, so rather than trying to be exotic, it just came out of our pores.”

The missing link between Tim Buckley’s jazzily diffuse ballads circa Lorca and the exquisite ’80s electro-calligraphy of Japan, the Syrinx sound so thoroughly bypasses the emerging cliches of synth-powered rock, you often forget that the Moog is the trio’s primary instrument. Prindle’s saxophone, processed using an octave-doubler that created a phasing-like effect, also contributed to the non-rock feeling, as does the languid pitter of Wells’s percussion.

Although they never got beyond cult success in their own time, Syrinx were admired by fellow musicians and people in the Canadian art world. There was a steady stream of invitations to work with dance troupes and score short films, including one starring the young David Cronenberg. Proof of their “musician’s musicians” status came following a catastrophe that befell the group during the recording of their second album. A studio fire destroyed not only the tapes of the work-in-progress, but all the group’s equipment. The Toronto scene rallied around Syrinx, organizing a benefit concert that raised thousands of dollars – enough to buy every member of the group new and superior instruments. Mills-Cockell replaced his melted and blackened Moog with an ARP 3500, “the newest kid on the block in terms of modular synths.” Instead of being utterly crushed by the calamity, Syrinx were buoyed up and refreshed, and restarted the recording of what would be their definitive and final record, Long Lost Relatives.

Lacking a vocal focus, Syrinx were never going to be a chart-topping proposition, nor would their low-key sound wow rock audiences at concert halls and arenas. Nonetheless, both of their albums sold decently in Canada, boosted by the popularity of Long Lost Relatives’ “Tillicum,” which became a modest hit in the Canadian singles chart after featuring as the intro theme for Here Come The Seventies, a science documentary TV program. Syrinx’s infiltration of the Canadian mainstream peaked with the live national broadcast of an orchestral adaption of “Stringspace,” a song-suite on Long Lost Relatives, done in collaboration with the Toronto Repertory Orchestra. But after that triumph, the band were pulled in different directions. Mills-Cockell pursued a solo career with a series of ’70s albums that are lined up for reissue as the third installment of “The JMC Retrospective,” a nickname for the program of archival releases that started with a lavish Intersystems boxset, released in 2015 on the Alga Marghen label, and continued with RVNG Intl.’s 2016 Syrinx anthology Tumblers From The Vault.

The United States of America

The best known of the synthedelic groups, United States of America are a temporal paradox: ahead of their time and behind their time, at the same time.

The group’s founder, Joseph Byrd, was an avant-garde experimentalist as well as a scholar of music history, with a facility for the precise replication of centuries-old styles. Starting at Stanford in Northern California, then in New York and finally in Los Angeles, Byrd rubbed shoulders with figures like Terry Riley, David Tudor and Yoko Ono, and engaged in most of the era’s avant-garde trends, from composing and performing John Cage-style conceptual scores to creating electronic sound-poems. But he was simultaneously earning a crust cranking out arrangements for a Time-Life series of Civil War albums, while also studying early music and researching Asian classical music. “I’m probably the only experimental composer of my generation who can write a crab canon, a six-part madrigal or a concerto grosso,” Byrd once quipped. The result of all this eclectic learning was United States of America’s strange and wondrous mixture of innovation and renovation, where the alien and archaic meshed in surprising and thrilling ways.

According to Byrd, the United States of America were the first band whose live concerts involved “not just electronic sound, but whole tape collages,” fed into the mixer via an eight-track stereo system, as well as visual effects and performance art elements. (The latter included a neon American flag, a life-size nun, fog machines and costume changes.) The aim was to “create a radical experience,” hijacking the rock format as a medium for transmitting confrontational sonic, lyrical and theatrical ideas to a mass audience. As well as a sonic revolutionary, Byrd was a political radical too: a member of the Communist Party, whose ideological rigor and discipline he preferred to the more ludic and spontaneist forms of left politics emerging out of the counterculture. His group’s name itself was a gauntlet thrown down to conformist patriots, akin to Hendrix’s incandescent revision of “The Star-Spangled Banner” at Woodstock a few years later, while songs like “Love Song For The Dead Ché” went far beyond the faddish guerrilla chic of hairy, pot-smoking students sticking Guevara posters on the walls of their crash pads. Yet Byrd’s sincere love of Americana kept creeping into the group’s music. United States of America’s self-titled debut (and – tragically – their solitary album) actually starts with a medley of rousing, late 19th-century and early 20th-century big-band music in the patriotic style of John Philip Sousa, including a calliope rendition of “National Emblem” and the post-Civil War ditty “Marching Through Georgia.”

Like Fifty Foot Hose and Intersystems, United States of America developed their own idiosyncratic electronic treatments. They applied pick-ups, distortion effects and Slinkies to the drums; put filters on singer Dorothy Moskowitz’s voice; and electronically adapted a harpsichord and a violin, heard to gorgeously wavering effect on “Cloud Song.” They also used a ring modulator built by a young Tom Oberheim, an engineer who would become a major figure in the invention and marketing of electronic music technology in the 1970s.

United States of America’s arsenal of sound-warping techniques are heard at their utmost on “The Garden Of Earthly Delights,” which sounds like nothing before but plenty since. (It would be only a slight exaggeration to say that Broadcast based an entire career on this one song.) Shrieking synths harass the ear like harpies and Moskowitz’s vibrato-less voice runs through the listener like a lance. As striking as the sonics, the lyrics conjure a vision of witchy feminism at once seductive and forbidding. Titled with acrid irony, “The Garden Of Earthly Delights” presents a daemonic view of nature and sex as a Venus flytrap for the unwary male: imagine the Doors’s “Hello, I Love You” with lyrics torn from the pages of Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae. “Garden Of Earthly Delights” is immediately followed on the album by another feminist statement, albeit more indirect and satirical: “I Won’t Leave My Wooden Wife For You, Sugar,” the apologia of a respectable husband who walks on the wild side with his mistress, then returns to the Stepford-like safeness of suburban matrimony.

When United States of America broke up, Byrd’s split impulses – futurism versus tradition – continued through his next project Joe Byrd and the Field Hippies and its one album The American Metaphysical Circus, and culminated with the Bicentennial-themed 1976 LP Yankee Transcendoodle: Electronic Fantasies for Patriotic Synthesizer. Released on John Fahey’s folk label Takoma, the album earned praise from Rolling Stone’s Greil Marcus, not generally known for his fondness for electronic music. Reviewing the record, Marcus noted the unlikely nature of the project, coming as it did from “the one-time leader of the ill-fated ‘avant-garde’ rock group the United States of America.” But he applauded its renditions of patriotic airs as “bright, lively, spunky, and full of charm; the music one hears all one’s life without ever really listening to it,” and joked that “it would be un-American to pass” up the chance to listen to the album.

The Sinking of Synthedelia

During the last two years of the ’60s, the Band and their mentor Bob Dylan were the principal instigators of a backlash against psychedelia and a return to the American roots of rock in blues, country and folk. Released four days before the end of 1967, Dylan’s John Wesley Harding had been recorded in just two days, its spare, rough-hewn sound an implicit rebuke to the studio artifice and trippy effects of the psychedelic summer. The Band’s 1968 debut Music From Big Pink was even more influential, offering a path forward for rock that eschewed over-production in favor of a weathered sound that seemed honest and mature. Dylan disciples the Byrds dropped the blissed-out psych of Younger Than Yesterday and The Notorious Byrd Brothers like a hot potato and embraced full-on country-rock with Sweetheart Of The Rodeo, while the Doors recovered their bluesy mojo and Creedence Clearwater Revival dominated AM radio with lean, driving singles that renovated ’50s rock & roll. The content of the music shifted too, with what could be called Rock’s Historical Turn. Instead of lyrics about dancing, drugs or fighting in the street, you had the Band writing story-songs about the Civil War or the plight of farmers at the turn of the century, while Randy Newman turned his mordant satirical eye on the slave trade.

Could American rock history have gone another way, avoiding this re-rooting of the music in the backwoods soil of the South? Perhaps, if a major US band had steered hard in an opposite direction. Intriguingly, a number of established psychedelic-era bands did toy with electronics and musique concrète. Released in September 1967, the Doors’ single “Strange Days” features a ghostly flutter of Moog synth, while the sessions for the Byrds’ January 1968 album The Notorious Byrd Brothers produced synth-infused pieces like “Space Odyssey” and the consummate period piece “Moog Raga,” a droning instrumental left off the original LP but rescued for a later expanded reissue. Up in San Francisco, Jefferson Airplane made a stab at musique concrète with After Bathing At Baxter’s’ “A Small Package Of Value Will Come To You” and a brief electronic sortie with Crown Of Creation’s “Chushingura.” The Grateful Dead’s Anthem Of The Sun was informed by the avant-classical training of bassist Phil Lesh and pianist Tom Constanten. “We were making a collage,” Jerry Garcia later recalled. “It had to do with an approach that’s more like electronic music or concrète music, where you are actually assembling bits and pieces towards an enhanced non-realistic representation.” But soon the Dead joined the general retreat to the raw and the rootsy, with Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty.

The effect on American rock was like a sudden switch back from technicolor to black-and-white. Given the plain palette of so much 1969-70 rock – jammed-out bluesy boogie in the Canned Heat and Allman Brothers mode, nasal pseudo-country harmony singing à la CSN&Y and their afterbirth – it is tempting to imagine an entirely alternative history for rock. It’s a parallel world where Fifty Foot Hose’s Cauldron, United States of America’s self-titled album and synthedelic oddities from Syrinx, Silver Apples, Beaver & Krause and Tonto’s Expanding Head Band were just the run-up to a giant leap into the electronic future. But in this world, they remain tentative steps towards a path not taken.

Silver Apples

This New York duo comprised percussionist/vocalist Danny Taylor and a fellow who went by just his first name – Simeon – and who identified so strongly with his self-made electronic instrument he named it “The Simeon.” Resembling a computer console from a science-fiction B-movie flipped onto its back, the Simeon featured 86 manual controls that modulated nine oscillators. Not content with wielding this formidable contraption, Simeon also warbled and occasionally strummed the banjo. An unlikely (if also Joseph Byrd-redolent) element of American traditional music occasionally surfaces in the midst of the Silver Apples futuristic delirium, such as in the bluegrass-flavored “Ruby” and “Confusion.” “Oscillation,” their first single and the opening track on their self-titled 1968 debut album, is the group’s defining song, with Simeon and Taylor yowling about “oscillations, oscillations, electronic evocations... spinning magnetic fluctuations” in a high-pitched, highly-strung quaver. Contact followed in 1969, featuring the wonderfully baleful and accusatory “A Pox On You.” Then, Silver Apples split. But in response to cult interest, stimulated by an unofficial reissue of their two albums, Simeon reactivated the group in 1996 and they subsequently recorded three new albums, most recently 2016’s Clinging To A Dream.

Lothar and the Hand People

Lothar was the theremin, of course. But the main visual attraction of the band’s live show was only an intermittent presence on their 1968 debut Presenting...Lothar and the Hand People, which showcases a winsome psych-pop group somewhere between the Beacon Street Union and the Left Banke. Tantalizing wibbles of theremin and Moog fill the gaps between songs like “Kids Are Little People” and “Ha (Ho)” but do not disrupt the twee proceedings themselves (more’s the pity). Still, “Milkweed Love” is a full-blown electro pop ballad, a rolling, seasick drone of detuned synth; the demented audio-collage “It Comes On Anyhow” would be sampled 20 years later by the Chemical Brothers for their psychedelic juggernaut “It Doesn’t Matter;” the twinkling electro-tones of “Paul In Love” look ahead to ’90s IDM. The group’s second album Space Hymn is a more full-blown foray into electronic rock, spattered with detuned droops and tonal smears. The high point is the title track, an ambient expanse that begins like a parody of a meditation record (“imagine there is nothing but you and the sound”), then shifts into a vision of the earth as a gigantic space vessel.

Beaver & Krause

Paul Beaver and Bernard Krause were the go-to guys in the ’60s when it came to the Moog synth. Sometimes individually and sometimes in tandem, they contributed synth-playing to records or coached rock stars through their fumbling attempts to grapple with the new instrument, with clientele including George Harrison, the Byrds, the Doors, Simon & Garfunkel and even the Monkees. In 1968, Beaver & Krause were hired by Nonesuch Records to create a kind of demonstration disc for the new technology, resulting in the double album The Nonesuch Guide To Electronic Music, which came with a 16-page “syllabus” booklet explaining the technical nitty-gritty of sound synthesis. Beaver & Krause then signed to Limelight and released 1969’s Ragnarok, on which forbiddingly alien soundscapes like “Circle X” and “33rd Stanza Of A Hymn To Sancho Panza” alternated with wimpy acoustic guitar ballads like “The Fisherman” and bouncy electro ditties like “Moogie Blues Funk.” On In A Wild Sanctuary (1970) and Gondharva (1971), the environmental sounds joined their identity confusion of electronics and acoustics, songcraft and ambience. Results were variable, but on the positive side featured chilly gems of early electronica like “Spaced,” “Nine Moons In Alaska” and “So Long As The Water Flows.” After Beaver’s death in 1975, Krause sporadically released solo albums (including a New Nonesuch Guide To Electronic Music in 1981) but dedicated most of his energy to his work as a bioacoustician and documenter of natural soundscapes. Tragically, his archives and recording equipment went up in smoke during the 2017 California wildfires.

Tonto’s Expanding Head Band

There were two humans in Tonto’s Expanding Head Band: Malcolm Cecil, a British music industry veteran with a background in jazz and blues, and Robert Margouleff, maker of soundtracks for underground movies and producer of the first Lothar and the Hand People album. But just like Lothar, the band was named after its lead instrument, T.O.N.T.O. An Acronym for “The Original New Timbral Orchestra,” it was not so much an all-new invention as an assemblage of existing ones. Moog and ARP synths, modules, sequencers, keyboard controllers and other gadgets were coordinated into a monstrous mega-synth so large that both Cecil and Margouleff could play it at the same time. T.O.N.T.O was designed to be “the first real-time performing electronic music instrument,” and parts of Zero Time, their 1971 debut album, were indeed laid down live in the studio, as opposed to programmed and assembled at the mixing desk. But the best pieces on the album are those that depart from the light touch and nimble grooviness of conventional musicality. “Jetsex,” for instance, is a whooshing and clanking mechanism that anticipated the sinister Doppler effect section of Kraftwerk’s “Autobahn.” Listening to the album’s other high point, the shimmering vocoder psalm “Riverson,” it’s hard to understand why Tonto have received so little credit as electronic pioneers. Perhaps if they’d pursued a recording career more single-mindedly (there’s just Zero Time and 1974’s not-as-strong follow-up It’s About Time), rather than being subsumed into Stevie Wonder’s operation as his synth technicians, Cecil & Margouleff might be rated as highly as Hutter & Schneider.

Nik Pascal Raicevic

Not much is known about Nik Raicevic, who recorded under various permutations of his own name, such as Nik Pascal, as well aliases like Art In Space and 107-34-8933. First through his own Hollywood-based label Narco Records, and then via the major label imprint Buddah, in the early ’70s Raicevic released a series of abstract, rippling Moog mindscapes with titles like The Sixth Ear and Zero Gravity that anticipate the extended odysseys of Klaus Schulze and Conrad Schnitzler. His music’s relationship to the drug culture could hardly have been more blatant. Head, for instance, featured tracks with titles like “Lysergic Acid Diethylamide” and the 17-minute “Cannabis Sativa,” and came with a stoned-to-say-the-least bit of text: “The sound of numbers for soaking in soft dreams. Sweet moments and private notes making a rhyme into a habit. An album that creates the ultimate environment for the smoke generation. Taste it.” If the framing is a little dated, the music itself achieves a zonked timelessness. Highly – pun intended – recommended.