imposed by Mario Maggi to participate on the project was that the MCS70 were the only synthesizer used in it. All the sounds had to be obtained from it, even the drum sounds. The MCS70 would be presented in the 1978 Frankfurt Musikmesse and, for Maggi, the album would be a demonstration of the capabilities of his new synth. MCS means "Memory Controlled Synthesizer". It was common for synths at the time to need the manual adjustment of every control in the panel to get a desired sound, a task that often took a considerable amount of time. In the MCS70 a sound, once programmed, could be stored in memory and quickly recovered later. Mario Maggi filled the 64 available memory positions with sounds created by him and these were the sounds used in the album. Only one MCS70 was ever built. Before going into production, polyphonic synthesizers like the Sequential Circuits Prophet 5 arrived at the market and, all of a sudden, monophonic synths were considered obsolete. Mario Maggi then dropped the MCS70 project and started what would be his most famous synthesizer project ever: the polyphonic Elka Synthex. In many regards, though, the MCS70 was superior. The MCS70 was bought by Patrizio Fariselli, member of the Italian Progressive Rock band Area, and used extensively in the band's 1980 album Tic-Tac. Reception French musician Jean Michel Jarre was the first person to get a copy of Automat. While Automat was being produced, Jarre released his album Oxygène, which became one of the most famous works of electronic music ever. Through the intervention of Claude Cavagnolo, at the time the representative of Montarbo's audio products in France, Mario Maggi was introduced to Jarre and met him in his studio in Paris in 1978. At this occasion Jarre listened to a copy of Automat on tape and, after giving an autographed copy of Oxygène to Mr. Maggi, was given a copy of Automat as a gift (although the album was not yet available in the music stores). Back cover In the back cover, besides the production credits, the album had the following text: This text was inserted by the EMI's commercial personnel. The artists had nothing to do with it. References Mario Maggi Interview on Amazona.de (German) Mario Maggi's Synthex 2 page MCS70 page on Synthmuseum.com MCS70 restoration news on soundmit.com Youtube video of MCS70 restoration External links Romano Musumarra official