2010 January 23 « Roland MC-8 Micro-Composer

Yellow Magic Orchestra / Hideki Matsutake MC-8 Demo

Ralph’s friend Akiko translated this for us:

Hideki Matsutake is explaining what is MC8 and how it was used in the Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO)’s concert tour in ’80.

In this video, he says as follows
0:00 “Is there anyone who has this?” (laugh)
0:06 “There’s someone raising his hand….must be our staff.”
0:12 “This was VERY expensive in those days….as much as you could buy a car.”
0:17 “You could have bought two Carola. ‘Cause it was 700000 yen then.”
0:24 “We’ve experienced many things with this…”
0:27 “As for YMO, it was MC8 and the combination of units after all.”
0:31 “Ah yes…it was… really….. beyond human power.”
0:38 “But it wasn’t perfect.”
0:39 “Yeah.”
0:40 ” As you know, it sometimes became out of control.”
0:50 “Today, it has data in it. In those days, the data was transferred from cassette, but since it is not stable, I used MD.”
1:03 “We went to Masayuki’s office to test it the other day.”
1:15 “We worked on the original data cassette at that time.”
1:20 “That’s right.”
1:21 “And then, we really had a hard time.”
1:25 “The cassette, this one as well as the other we brought, the pinch roller was gone. So it didn’t read data…and it was hard after that too.
1:33 “But we were able to read it anyway.”
1:35 “As for *****, did it take about 3 minutes to read the data?”
1:39 “Well….yeah, it did. It took as long as the playing time.”
1:50 ” From here, automatic playing is sent.”
1:55 “Now, let’s listen to the sound in it”
2:06 “Which tune is this?”
2:10 “You don’t know, right? It is playing backwards.”
2:22 “Today you’re going to run this MC8 here.”
2:28 “Right. With this one called Immu(???) and sequencer, I will play ****(a song title?) live.”

That’s it. I couldn’t understand completely what he was saying. Those I didn’t understand was probably song titles and names of instruments. Anyway, there must be the video in which he plays/runs MC8 following this, but I haven’t looked for it yet.