Hans Edler

Hans Edler is a multi-talented Swedish singer, guitarist, and composer who is best known in his homeland as a pop singer, while internationally he's primarily known for his pioneering computer music album Elektron Kukéso (1971). Born on March 23, 1945, in the Björkhagen district of Stockholm, Sweden, he began his musical career in the late '60s as the singer of the Ghostriders, a pop band influenced by the Shadows. In 1969, however, his career took an odd twist when he began a three-year musical project at EMS (i.e., Elektroakustisk Musik i Sverige), a state-of-the-art studio in Stockholm with a room-size computer. Between 1969 and 1971, Edler painstakingly composed computerized pop music and released an album's worth of it, Elektron Kukéso (1971), on his own label, Marilla. Though far ahead of its time, the album proved unsuccessful from a commercial standpoint. Its rarity, not to mention its oddity, later made Elektron Kukéso a collector's item. The album was eventually reissued in 2004 on Boy Wonder Records with bonus material and deluxe packaging. After the release of Elektron Kukéso in 1971, Edler continued to release music on Marilla, beginning with another collectable album, Spökhistorier (1972), on which actor Stig Järrel reads a few horror stories (e.g., "Det Skvallrande Hjärtat," a Swedish adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart) over creepy electronic music composed by Edler. Other notable releases by Edler on Marilla during the 1970s include Space Vision (1979), a space disco album; Disco-Time (1979), a collection of disco covers; and Jukebox Graffiti, a multi-volume series of hit parade cover albums. In later years, Edler carved out a niche for himself as a 1960s revivalist. One of his most successful latter-day album releases was the Top Ten...