Popular Music
The earliest known band to utilize the MC-8 was the Japanese electronic music group Yellow Magic Orchestra in 1978, for their self-titled album and for member Ryuichi Sakamoto's solo album Thousand Knives, with Hideki Matsutake as the programmer in both albums. At the time, Billboard noted that the use of such computer-based technology in conjunction with synthesizers allowed Yellow Magic Orchestra to create new sounds that were not possible until then. The band later described the MC-8, along with member Hideki Matsutake who programmed it, as an "inevitable factor" in both their music production and live performances.
Richard James Burgess and John L. Walters from the band Landscape were also among the first major commercial users of the MC-8. They began experimenting with computer-programmed music and Burgess's co-designed SDS5 electronic drums in the late 1970s making records in the emerging New Romantic, electronic dance music and synthpop genres. They triggered various synths such as the Roland System 100 and Moogs which also used CV/Gate. Burgess created the drum parts by using the multiplex outputs of the MC8 to trigger the prototype, breadboard version of the SDS5 drum synthesizer. Most of the album From the Tea-rooms of Mars (1981) was made this way and Burgess produced many other tracks this way including the European club hit "Angel Face" (1980) for the group Shock. Burgess and Walters demonstrated the MC-8 on BBC TV's Tomorrow's World.
Read more about this topic: Roland MC-8 Microcomposer
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