The Letter

In 1971, Swedish rocker Hans Edler's career took a sharp left turn. He released what some claim is the world's first pop album to be created entirely on a computer, with his own eerie vocals layered on top. He had spent two years creating it, and the results are stupefying, like one of those deranged "outsider" albums, but with meticulous microtones instead of wrong notes and primitive technology instead of primitive technique. Elektron Kukéso is an unlistenable must-listen, a stew of strong pop sensibility and avant-garde insanity that somehow sounds so wrong but feels so, so right. So, yeah, it bombed. And he went back to making records like this: