Mark’s Keyboard Repair

The story goes that Mark Ramos Nishita was a jobbing carpenter fixing the gate of the studio where the Beastie Boys were recording Paul’s Boutique, and got into a conversation with producer Mario Caldato which led to him contributing significantly to every Beasties album from Check Your Head on as well as many more Caldato produced classics like Beck’s Odelay. Like any Beastie-adjacent story that should be taken with a pinch of salt, but whatever the truth, Money Mark is a talent for the ages. Mark’s Keyboard Repair seems cheesy on the face of it: lots of short funk and soul sketches played on keyboards that were archaic even in 1995, with zero in the production to mark them out as existing in the digital age. But the composition and in-the-pocket playing of everything is eerily perfect. This is minimalism and deep understanding of the groove to match The Meters, it’s simplicity sometimes so abstracted it can hypnotise like techno. What, on paper, seems kitsch is actually unbelievably profound, more so as the record ages.