Mark Ramos-Nishita is Money Mark, the low-fi Stevie Wonder, a super cool keyboard player who toured with the Beastie Boys and appeared on the 90's albums. The story goes that he was a carpenter that turned up to fix a gate at their studio and ended up recording the keyboard parts for their album Check Your Head.
MARK'S KEYBOARD REPAIR is a fun, brisk listen. Recorded entirely on vintage keyboards it's a collection of 19 funk, pop and lounge tracks delivered at pace, in under 40 minutes. All of demo quality they're mainly musical doodles, sketches of tracks to be fleshed out properly later. Some appearing in more polished form on his following albums.
Occasionally there's a fully crafted little cracker like the aching 'Cry', the surreal 'Got My Hand In Your Head' or the soulful 'Sometimes You Gotta Make It Alone'. Mostly they're short jazzy lounge grooves. Mashed up concoctions of strange synthesised squelches, drum loops, vintage samples and his keyboard lines. The best of these is the inventive and quirky 'Insects Are All Around Us'.
If you can root out a copy it's worth a listen or check out the tracks below...
'Insects Are All Around Us'
'Sometimes You Gotta Make It Alone'
'Cry'
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