Cassette Tapes, Duct Tape, and Inspiration in the Park

Little wonder, then, that someone who can translate every conceivable input into music would be an equally compulsive collector. Sitting on the control room couch after a long day of recording for the Beasties’ new album, Money Mark (a.k.a. Mark Ramos-Nishita) provides a window into the hub of his digital life — in the form of a Mac laptop. “It’s really an obsession,” he says, showing us his iPhoto library, which is filled with impromptu video clips of musicians he’s worked with, as well as snapshots of studios, people, and performance rigs — like his own personal YouTube. Someday, he says, his archive will arrive for sale on DVD, but that desire is not driven by vanity or commerce. Mark has essentially made himself a repository of musical revelations; in the course of creating seven solo albums, collaborating with the Beastie Boys, joining in on experimental flights with groups like the Omar Rodriguez-Lopez Quintet, and working on countless other projects, Money Mark has been channeling rivers of musical experience into a personal fusion.

“When I’m working with musicians like [drummer] Jim Keltner and [bassist] Carol Kaye, mostly what I get from the experience is their story,” he says, referring to two of the musicians who played on his latest solo album, Brand New By Tomorrow. “Of course, I get their playing on their recording, but I get their story, how they got to that moment. That was the beauty [of working with] analog tape [on earlier projects]. The engineer would say, ‘Come back in a couple hours. We’ll have your song cut up,’ because they would actually cut it. So we took breaks and talked. I tried to soak it all up.”

“They’ve got a million stories to tell you,” says Mark of his many excellent collaborators. “Jim told me one. They were mixing down a Steely Dan song. He was listening to his drums, and he popped his head up and said, ‘That drum sounds f**king great. What did you guys do?’ And no one could figure it out. Someone had walked around the console and kicked the [power source for the] Fairchild compressor out of the wall. Those capacitors are so big that the energy was still in there, but as the power was dying out of the thing, it seemed to create the right voltage. And it just made the drums sound amazing.”

When Mark absorbs knowledge from other musicians, he learns from the best — Jim is a legendary drummer who has worked with the Rolling Stones and multiple former Beatles, for example, while Carol is known for creating amazing, signature bass lines for the likes of Phil Spektor and Brian Wilson. Mark pulls up a short video clip of Carol laying down a perfect bass track. “She thought it was just a sound check, but we were rolling the tape,” he explains. He watches the video intently, as if trying to soak in its secrets anew.

Like Keltner and Kaye, Money Mark’s own resume shines with collaborations featuring some of the best players on the planet — Google them and be amazed. But it’s that spontaneity, that first-take brilliance he seems to be after.

The Joy of Tape

From the time when he was young, Money Mark used the simplest pieces of technology to make music. From his earliest experiments to his latest album, he’s never stopped using tape recorders creatively — even now, in an age when computers reign.

“When I was in high school, I did a lot of stuff on four-track cassette,” says Mark excitedly. “I had an old Fostex X-15 [with an attachable battery pack]. And I was like, ‘This is my open door!’ I took an old drum kit, went to a parking lot or wherever, and set up my microphones to record. So I had great reverbs from parking lots and stairwells — great ambient stuff, too. And on that X-15, you could flip the tape over and hear everything backwards. And I was like, ‘I’m in love with this little f***ing machine.’”

Mark’s father was an electric engineer for Los Angeles-based Hughes Electronics; his mother grew up in a household of musicians. From early childhood through his present projects, Mark has fused both influences: electronics and traditional musicianship.

Basically, Mark turned his bedroom into a sonic laboratory. “I had a turntable, my records, a microphone, my tape deck, a Fender Rhodes, my guitar, a little drum set, and that was my whole world,” he says. “It kept me off the streets, it kept me active, it kept me in the art world, and it kept my brain active.” By age 15, he bought his first two mics: a Shure SM57 and a Neumann U47.

Mark tried to learn new musical techniques from the photos in records and magazines. “I looked at all of those old pictures, and I always wondered, ‘Why is there a little microphone taped onto the main microphone? Because that was running through a tape input,’” he says, referring to the process by which the smaller mic routes audio to a tape machine, and the gap between the record and playback heads creates a delay effect. “So I did that too for a while, before I bought my Echoplex [tape delay].”

Being able to cut up tape? Even better, says Mark. “Eventually, when I was in college, I saved $5,000 and I bought a TASCAM 24-track machine. I was able to flip over that tape, cut it, and make loops. I was reading about Jean-Jacques Perrey, musique concrete — this was cool. With a ruler, 7.5 inches was one second. You could make a whole beat by just cutting the tape at the right spots.” These experiences weren’t just childhood explorations, either; they have carried over into Mark’s solo work, and he shares an affection for analog techniques with collaborators like the Beastie Boys’ producer Rick Rubin.

Though some people delight in sonic high-tech, Mark falls much more into the duct-tape sonic hacker category. “All of that was born out of necessity,” he says. “I’d go to a gig and find my guitar cord was busted or wasn’t long enough, and I needed to extend it, so I’d be duct-taping two ends together and jumping it with something.” He grabs two keychains and a coin to demonstrates one do-it-yourself guitar hack. “I had a trick that I did with a quarter, tapping guitar cables together,” he says. “I did that on Push the Button, on one song called ‘Underneath it All.’ The guitar is doing this wild solo with a really thin, sustain-y distortion. I used this trick to create a rhythm during the solo. So what you hear is opening and closing the circuit [using the quarter as a bridge between guitar cables] and making a rhythm from that long, flowing guitar solo.”

Mark is proud of any creation that he can produce for a few dollars. But he’s proudest of his homebrewed Betamax Mellotron. It all started with one recorder — and then it grew. “I didn’t have a digital recorder,” he said. “But I had a Betamax machine that was High-8. That was the first machine that a consumer could buy that had digital sound. I only used the audio part of it. So I’d master my records [on Beta].” When Beta died as a consumer format, “You were able to get Beta machines for five bucks at yard sales. So I bought as many as I could. I wired those sounds into a keyboard that I broke out of an organ, put switches on it, and I made my own Mellotron. I’d start all the tapes and, when they were all running, I could play chords. I could change the tunings. I could do anything I wanted, because I could re-patch it.” Total cost? About $100. In another case, inspired by Van Halen “making those tubes hurt” using a Variac transformer, Mark rigged up a distortion setup using his guitar, a hardware store light dimmer, and his ghetto blaster. Result: “I would choke the s**t out of my radio,” Mark says.
It’s a design philosophy he still lives by today: “It’s all about taking a risk and finding something. It’s super-cool that all that is out there, within your reach.”

Performance on the Edge

There’s only one problem. What do you do with all these inputs, as both a well-schooled player and a creative, circuit-bending sound hacker with a childlike fascination with sound? Mark’s answer: Be experimental and traditional at the same time, in the same gig.

Working with the Omar Rodriguez-Lopez Quintet (formed by the Mars Volta’s guitarist) and other live projects allows Mark to mix experimental jazz and pop, Rhodes and guitar, and even drum loops. The axes at his disposal are nonetheless fairly conventional, or at least they start out that way. “Electric piano, Clavinet, organ, and a monophonic synth,” Mark says. In this case, a rare Roland VK-09 serves as the organ, and a Korg 770 (“almost like the MS-10,” he says) as the monosynth. “There have been thousands of records made with that setup,” he says. Of course, he might also throw in more unusual twists, such as a Professor Television photocell-powered Theremin kit (check out www.professortelevision.com for more), something certainly not found on thousands of albums.

“The show is a journey,” says Mark. “This mish-mash of stuff, mixing and matching improvisation. It’s very avant-garde, even. Then it starts to mutate into songs.” Flowing back and forth from the recognizable to the unrecognizable, from pop to experimental and back again, is part of what Mark says he likes.

“The whole basis of it is to take a risk,” Mark says. “I’m always on the edge with it. When it begins to fall into a notch, we start to recognize the harmonies and repetitive rhythm. It starts to feel good. Then it starts getting f**ked up again. This is this combination of tension and release.” With this and other live projects, Mark says, it’s taken a lot of evolution to learn to be so free with the music. “Not judging it at all” is what it’s about, he explains. “The essence of it is doing it and making something happen. It’s risky, but then the idea of the risk is that if you feel like you’re falling over, then you can take that and do something with it.”

Thus freed, Mark certainly doesn’t have difficulty finding ways to make something happen. While we were talking to him, he managed to rig up a sophisticated keyboard feedback loop and effects chain, using stompboxes, an iPod car adapter, and a portable Sony cassette machine. They’re routed through his standby effects setup: a Ross combo distortion and phase pedal and a beat-up Ibanez delay. And that was just during the course of the interview.

Sunday in the Park with Mark

Money Mark is so good at taking musical inputs that sometimes, it seems, he needs to unplug. On his newest album — his seventh solo record, Brand New By Tomorrow — he did just that. “I was really concentrating on the songwriting — chords, melody, a nice bridge,” he says. “So it didn’t matter as much how it was going to be arranged; I just really wanted to get the song done, as raw as possible. It wasn’t about the cool beat or the cool sound; it was more how the song lives.” But how do you resist the temptation to perform overwhelming amounts of sonic voodoo if you’re someone like Money Mark? Leave the studio and head for the local park.

“Get away from that electricity, get away from all those sequencers, drum machines, keyboards, and cool sounds, and get back to what the song is about,” explains Mark. So he grabbed a guitar, a Yamaha DJX (a low-end, late-’90s arranger keyboard with built in speakers), and his favorite Sony portable cassette recorder, and found a nice patch of grass.

Brand New By Tomorrow is perhaps one of Mark’s most traditional recordings. For a musician who is experimental onstage and a nearly compulsive sound designer both live and in the studio, that might be a surprise, but it’s a decision Mark embraced. The album is concise, just over a half-hour in its US release, but each song is tightly crafted and stripped to its bare essentials. “When I was recording it, I had so many choices of sounds, but I really just used what was necessary to make those songs happen,” says Mark. The release on Jack Johnson’s Brushfire Records seems a no-brainer: Johnson and Money Mark’s co-producer Mario Caldato, Jr. (known for producing many of the Beastie Boys albums) both supported the idea of an album that’s emotionally raw and acoustically intimate. The album is as close to the music made in the park as possible.

To get there, Mark stayed close to his first sketches. “The very first demo is what was on this machine, with a cassette tape and four double-A batteries,” he says. “With all the machines and recording gear that I have, that was enough to capture the essence of the song that was working in my head. The second recording of it was my attempt at playing all the instruments in a simple arrangement. A simple bass line, a guitar, another keyboard.” Next step: Take that same simple demo and give it to Jack.

“[Jack] said to me, ‘These sound finished,’” recalls Mark. “He told me, ‘We can polish it, redo it, and make it something else, the next step — without going too far. That’s what this is, kind of the third permutation of the songs.” To get there required a difficult process in the studio: Get as much as possible successfully crafted in single, live takes, and then make it all sound effortless. “If you listen to the record, it might sound easy and calm, but there was a lot of work [that went into it],” Mark affirms.

And that’s what’s extraordinary about Money Mark, what places him in the same echelon as many of the musicians he idolizes: Whether front man or side man, experimentalist or traditionalist, he’s always honest, always coherent, and he always communicates something personal on that first take.

“I think my responsibility for myself is to keep a tradition going, keep studying — taking jazz and making it evolve,” Mark reflects. “Keep this lineage intact, but also expand sideways, too, instead of just forward. It’s really a full-time job to do that and think about it constantly. I have so many notes that I’ve written in my book about what all these combinations could be and what it means to me. I don’t have enough time to put it all together,” he continues. “Maybe eventually I’ll get a lot of it done.”