About Analog Minds
Analog Minds is an independent, one-person art project based in San Francisco, built around drawing, skateboarding, music.
I got into hip hop and skateboarding in the 80s when I was around eleven. Eric B. & Rakim grabbed my attention super early after hearing Follow the Leader on Jeff Young’s Big Beat show on Radio 1 at my friend’s house. Another friend had his older brother’s It Takes a Nation of Millions on a hissy cassette. That was the kind of music I wanted to find more of.
Growing up away from the larger cities, not too many people at my school listened to hip hop. In my circle, it was mostly me and my mate Ben buying vinyl and trying to find out what else was out there.
Before pretty much everything became searchable and fed through never-ending scrolling feeds, finding more of it took some effort. New music came through late-night radio shows like Jeff Young’s Big Beat and National Fresh, recorded onto cassette, magazines if your newsagent could get them in, nerd-like spreadsheet-style mail-order lists and friends’ discoveries. We’d scour Hip Hop Connection for releases, then spend Saturdays travelling to Musiquarium in Swansea or Spillers Records in Cardiff to search for records. Swapping tapes to share the knowledge was the norm.
Skateboarding was developing in much the same way. I remember we’d rent Search for Animal Chin from the local surf shop because it was pretty much all that was around. Then Public Domain came out and one of the older guys had a badly copied tape of it. It got passed around and watched on loop until you had to give it back.
Santa Cruz Streets on Fire and Speed Freaks followed, introducing us to other types of music from bands like Dinosaur Jr., Sonic Youth and Black Flag. From there I started gravitating towards skating that felt rougher and less polished. Things that felt right a couple of years earlier suddenly felt a bit too clean.
Skateboarding became the same kind of treasure hunt: searching out lesser-seen magazines, travelling to skate shops that reeked of ink, badly copied video tapes and whatever else happened to make its way into our awareness. One thing usually led to another without you really noticing it happening.
A song in a skate video would send you searching for more, while listening for samples in hip hop could lead into older jazz, soul and funk records. A board graphic could make you wonder about its story, and a name buried in the credits might lead somewhere else entirely. Music, artwork, photography, clothes and scenes in places I’d never been to — all feeling authentic and outside the mainstream — started joining together.
One thing continually opened a route into something else.
Because there wasn’t an endless supply of everything, when you found something you tended to study it over and over.
I’d read every word on record sleeves, every production credit, every name on the label, the tiny logos, even whatever had been scratched into the vinyl. “No Sleep Nigel” appeared on enough records I owned that the name became familiar long before I had much idea who Nigel actually was. I just knew it was a good sign that his name was on it. When I was young, I thought he had hand-signed every vinyl.
Skate magazines and videos got the same treatment. You noticed the weird, more unique stuff the most — anything that didn’t feel like the regular mainstream. Those small details mattered because there often wasn’t much more information available outside of what you had access to, which wasn’t much when you lived away from it all.
The visual side of skateboarding worked its way in the same way. DIY hand-drawn graphics, photocopied ads, collage, Letraset, typewriters, textures, scissors, tape. Low-cost kinda ideas that, thinking back, authentically mirrored the broke-ass nature of everyday skateboarding for most people. Handmade solutions were found by accident and experimented with. Things were made with whatever happened to be nearby or available locally. Inspiration wasn’t coming from somewhere formally labelled as illustration or design either. It could be anything.
A lot of what now gets described as a lo-fi aesthetic wasn’t really trying to look that way. Some was intentional, of course, but a lot of it was simply what the tools, budget and circumstances produced. Bad photocopies, rough printing, wonky registration and accidents became part of the finished thing because an undo button wasn’t waiting to clean everything up afterwards.
Today street-level handmade styles are often created on expensive computers running expensive subscription software, plug-ins and texture packs, when they can still be made with rudimentary techniques and skills.
That roughness made distant scenes feel stranger and more interesting. A zine, sticker or board might suddenly appear at the local skate shop looking like it had been printed in somebody’s shed far away, somewhere it was all happening. It could feel like something from another planet.
The world felt larger then because so much of it was completely out of reach.
That distance left room for imagination. You might know a skater from a handful of photographs and a video part, a musician from a record sleeve and one interview, or an artist simply through the work. You studied what little you had and built the rest in your mind, adding to it whenever you discovered something more.
Skate photography worked that way too. A single frame could become much more in your imagination than the moment that was actually shot. Seeing a skater thousands of miles away through a magazine gave you a fraction of a second and nothing outside of it. Something that looked explosive and almost unreal on the page might have been less impressive in real life. Imagination filled in the gaps. It probably made some people, places and scenes seem more interesting than they really were, but the mystery was part of the attraction.
Skateboarding also proved to be an immediate connection with others. You could turn up somewhere unfamiliar, spot somebody carrying a board or wearing the right shoes and already know there was some common ground. You could tell a lot by the scuffs.
I was always drawn towards that side of things: skateboarding for skaters, independent labels, people making something because they wanted it to exist. It was always inspirational.
The early magazines felt closer to that world too, but the feeling changed over time, probably inevitably. People got older, publishing became more professional, costs went up and larger commercial structures appeared. The magazines still mattered. Some of the better ones vanished, some of the not-so-good ones did too, and along with them some of the looseness and unpredictability of the earlier years disappeared.
Skate videos weren’t widely available in the early days where I grew up. Any copies we could get hold of became copies of copies of copies. Tracking lines, flicker and blown-out colour had already been cooked into them before they reached you. Growing up looking at imperfect images meant those imperfections became part of what images looked like. Nobody was calling it an aesthetic.
Making things ourselves was similarly dependent on whatever was available. We’d sometimes borrow my dad’s video camera and film each other skating. None of us were particularly into filming at the time. I’d generally rather be skating than standing there with a heavy camera filming somebody trying the same trick for an hour. We just messed around with the equipment because it was there. We’d all watched enough skate videos to want to film our own clips.
Editing meant wiring two VCRs together through the television and recording from one tape onto another, pressing pause at the end of each clip, every cut leaving a random glitch where the recording stopped and started. For titles, we’d write or draw something in black ink on white paper, point the camera at it and use its crude built-in title function to reduce what it saw into rough pixels over the footage.
We’d point the camera at the edited clips playing on the television while recording to the video player, playing music through the audio input to merge it all together. The effect was discovered accidentally through trial and error, and sometimes laziness rather than intention.
Some of that resurfaced years later in the visual style of Science Skateboards design and videos, particularly The Important Nothing. Personal head nods to the early days rather than following a trend.
None of this is really about rejecting computers. I was using them when I was young too. My uncle gave me his Commodore CBM PET at an early age. Everything worked through code alone. I’d spend weeks typing code out of magazines to make games and messing around with simple randomised generative graphics. I’ve used computers pretty much ever since.
The distinction for me is less analog versus digital than what happens when a tool begins doing too much of the making for you. I still like processes that push something unexpected back at you. You make the next decision from what actually happened after the last one rather than having the luxury of stepping backwards and forwards using undo until the decision has been made.
Discovery has changed in a similar way. Today you can find out almost everything about something in minutes. Even if you don’t go looking, sooner or later an algorithm will probably decide you should see it anyway. There’s obviously a huge amount that’s useful about having that access, but something changes when there are no gaps left to fill yourself.
The hunt has largely been replaced by delivery. We’ve gained instant access to almost everything. I’m not sure we gained attention or depth along with it.
A lot of the drawings I make now come from photographs and people connected to that part of my life — skateboarding, hip hop and images that stayed in my head long after I first saw them, inadvertently developing tastes and attitudes along the way.
Drawing a photograph requires looking at it again in much the same way as we’d stare at record sleeves back in the early days. Something that nowadays might be absorbed in a few seconds while scrolling, then forgotten about, gets examined for hours or days through hand-drawn techniques on paper.
The drawings are made by hand on paper and photographed or scanned for print. The photographs they’re based on are credited wherever possible. They’re tributes to times, people, images and things I’ve mostly been interested in since I was young — things that carved a groove and stayed there.
I’ve been skateboarding since the mid-1980s and later spent a long time running an independent skateboard company, Science. Analog Minds is a project, mostly an outlet for the things I work on. I draw, build the site and put things out when they’re ready rather than trying to manufacture a constant stream of new stuff.