The expense of state-of-the-art tape editing equipment meant that access to the tools required to make musique concrte was rare in the 60s, which is why so much of the early musique concrte was a product of the academy; big schools had the funds to support institutions like the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Studio. One exception to this general trend was studio engineer Tod Dockstader, who created sound effects for the children's program Gerald McBoingBoing by day, and stuck around the studio at night creating alien sound worlds out of heavily manipulated recordings of water, laughing, chimes, balloons, white noise, tone generators and cymbals. The result is a kind of alchemical distillation of sound, with Dockstader subjecting his Brobdingnagian archive of source material (said to be 300,000 feet of tape) to a microscopically focused process of editing and recombination. A true pioneer, I've listed both his Apocalypse CD and his Quatermass CD together because you really need them both.