The Jukebox Rebel

Automat was a project headed by the Italian musicians from a pop band called Bottega dell'arte; Romano Musumarra, Claudio Gizzi (composers) and Mario Maggi (programmer of sounds in a Memory Controlled Synthesizer MCS70). They made an electronic album back in 1978, a curious mix of drone music, bizarre stuff a la Pierre Henry 'machine danse' and electro-pop in Kraftwerk or Jean Michel Jarre vein. The first side is totally taken by the long Automat suite by Claudio Gizzi, while the B side contains three shorter tracks by Musumarra: the track 'droid' was very famous in Brazil because was used like theme of a TV telenews, "Jornal da Globo" (Globo TV) in early 80's. Every sounds on Automat were generated by the MCS70, a monophonic synth built by Luciano Torani, who intended to use the album as the demo disc for the MCS70 (all the tracks were programmed on an analog sequencer). Unfortunately, Only one MCS70 synthesizer was produced.