Way out of their rural Ohio depth — and gloriously so — The Astro-Phonics were three science-club misfits who bonded over surf records and issues of _Popular Mechanics_. In 1965 they dragged a homemade echo tank (constructed from a washtub, spare springs, and a borrowed church microphone) into a friend’s barn and cut “Pulsar Boogie,” a reverb-drenched instrumental so bizarre for its time that local DJs refused to play it, insisting it was “either broken or communist.”