Some band names immediately ingratiate themselves with you, even if it’s through their selected nuttiness. MKS, as an acronym for Musical Keyboard System, is definitely one of them and spontaneously provokes questions like what, conversely, a non-musical keyboard system might have to offer. The short-lived project of Frenchman Nicolas Aubard had a program that is well summarized by the first title of the record, »The New Age of House«. Somewhere between the pounding programmed drum machines of New Beat and the ethereal New Age melodies of sounds from digital presets (oboe, pan flute!), MKS was a strange musical bastard, created within the four walls of Aubard’s home studio. Aubard’s meeting with DJ Emmanuel Prevost resulted in the release of the album “New Synthetic World” in 1989, for which Prevost did the mastering. After that, the system was already over again. A selection of half of the tracks from the album has now been released on STROOM. Among them such beautiful bizarreness as the computer-voice-dominated »Twilight Zone«, the dissonant-circular synthesizer patterns in it build a bridge from the martial EBM sound to what was to make bigger waves in club music a little later. Today especially appealing due to the artificial digital legacies from the second half of the eighties, which have been very popular again for some time. And this system was always musical.
Musical Keyboard System
