In 1968, Walter Carlos (a.k.a. Wendy Carlos) and Benjamin Folkman turned John Sebastian Bach into a 15-minute pop deity by transposing a handful of his “greatest hits” to an early Modular Moog synthesizer, tediously recreating every lurch of the old divine sewing machine on a custom-built 8-track. Switched On Bach earned the old bewigged master three Grammy Awards, seventeen weeks on the Billboard Top 40, and the post-humous satisfaction of being the first classical composer to go platinum. To Carlos and Folkman’s great pride, it carved out a space for the synthesizer in the West’s pop musical imaginary, eliciting orders for Moog organs everywhere from cushy American recording studios to the Zodiak Free Arts Lab in West Germany, where synth-based krautrock acts Tangerine Dream and Cluster got together for their first group improvisations. Who cares if it needed to be paired with something as tried and true as the Brandenburg concerto for people to listen up? For a hot moment — just as every new technology has its “hot moment” — the pulsating, electronic revelation of the analogue synth was the sound of the future.

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