From the living room of his apartment in Seattle’s Queen Anne neighborhood, artist and musician Shawn McClure has a pretty killer view of the city’s skyline. Even if he couldn’t see it from the table where he works, it’s a view he’s seen thousands of times, as he’s carved it — along with other cityscapes and a wide variety of designs — into old vinyl record albums.
McClure is the creative force behind Skylinyl, a startup brand born out of his precision with an X-Acto knife that is looking to make a bigger play with the help of a Kickstarter campaign and a bit of technology.
McClure first had the idea for carving his art into someone else’s (musical) art during a 2013 trip to Sydney, Australia, when he came across a crate of records headed for the dump. The desire to salvage and repurpose the vinyl turned into a passion, and three years later he has created around 3,000 record designs out of used albums.
McClure, 28, hooked up with his friend Taylor Jackson, 29, who acts as Skylinyl’s director of operations, and the two are pushing to accelerate the production process — each record takes about 2 hours to cut by hand — by introducing a sophisticated laser cutting machine to the mix.
With the resurgence of vinyl as a popular music medium over the past several years, McClure is poised to tap into people’s analog appreciation. But he said for a long time he was apprehensive about messing with his hand-carved works by introducing a machine-driven process.
“What it’s come down to is I spend so much time making the same designs over and over again and there’s such a demand for it,” McClure said. “I’m not even scratching the surface of all the designs that I want to do, like new stuff and branching out into different designs and doing more 3D things and optical-illusion pieces.”
McClure’s designs are cut into unplayable records and also what he and Jackson characterize as “unwanted” records, such as a copy of Eddie Murphy’s classic 1985 single “Party All the Time,” which sits on a coffee table in McClure’s apartment.
“We can go into a record store and ask, ‘Do you guys have excess records?’ And they have a box in the corner or downstairs — they want to get it off their shelves so they can get new stock in,” Jackson said. “They’ve got all these $1 records that are sitting there, and we’re like, ‘Alright, we’ll take ’em off your hands.'”
Skylinyl has a back stock of a couple hundred records right now, and the guys know where they could get their hands on a few thousand more in no time, so part of the Kickstarter’s purpose is to help the company secure warehouse and production space.
The campaign has a goal of $75,000, and as of this weekend, was about of third of the way there with 19 days remaining. Pledge packages include a range of different framed artwork offerings, all the way up to the $2,500 “motherload” and a $10,000 weekend in Seattle package for the Kickstarter wrap-up party.
McClure, who has no formal art or tech or business training, says before starting Skylinyl he was just playing drums. He still does that, in a Seattle band called Model Snake, and his drum kit sits a foot from his bed in a room that has broken cymbals hanging on the walls.
His artwork mostly hangs on the walls of coffee shops and record stores and people’s homes. But he got a break — and witnessed the potential for bigger things in Seattle — when someone bought one of his pieces and hung it in their office, catching the attention of someone at Google. Before he knew it there was an email thread and he had 10 pieces hanging in the Binoculars Building in Los Angeles where Google has offices.
Generally his pieces sell for about $150. A more extensive piece of work, such as a panoramic skyline piece in his apartment that uses a dozen records — including white Sub Pop vinyl — sells for about $1,400.
“The city skyline stuff holds a deep value,” Jackson said. “There’s something about music and cities — they’re tied together.”
Indeed, McClure’s home studio affords him an inspiring viewpoint.
“I get to see this all the time,” McClure said motioning to the Seattle skyline. “I’m always listening to music or doing work here. Skylines are kind of engraved in me.”
The Kickstarter page lists numerous city skylines to choose from, from Austin to Paris. McClure has templates for designs he originally created, and there is a demand for especially popular artist faces pieces such as Kurt Cobain or Jimi Hendrix.
Jackson said adding a high-tech machine will speed that process — while still allowing time for McClure to do custom hand-cut works. They have their eye on a Co2 laser cutting machine which could run between $30,000 and $50,000.
But whatever machine they choose, it’s important that it’s eco friendly.
“We want to make sure that everything we do goes with our vibe of sustainability,” Jackson said. “There’s some gasses that are released during the cutting process, and so we’re experimenting with a filtration system, that would actually neutralize the gasses that come out of the machine, and keep it all ‘no carbon footprint.'”
The machine will also allow the price point to come down. For those who don’t want to spend $200 on a hand-cut piece, maybe they’ll spend $80 or so on a machine-cut piece.
“Shawn’s never going to stop cutting the records — it’s just two different markets,” Jackson said, adding that they’ve done the research and they believe there is a demand for the mass-produced artwork.
The focus now is on expanding, gaining a national audience and looking for distribution channels or attracting the attention of other brands. Jackson said there’s been interest from people in the music industry, naturally, and Hollywood as well.
“It’s fun,” Jackson said. “It’s been a constant learning process for both of us, seeing what works and what doesn’t work … reaching out and having people reach out to us and get interested in it.”
McClure does do some cutting now on a less precise machine, called an X-Carve, which is fed by an open-source software program called Easle, which transfers images into computer files. During my visit, I watched as the machine cut the Seattle skyline and GeekWire logo into a record.
“When we have the big-scale machine, we can do anything, we really can,” Jackson said. “Just program it in and have it dialed in, basically. It takes this couple-hour process down to 10 minutes.”
For McClure, there was a sense of urgency involved, too. He doesn’t want to get stuck holding the X-Acto knife while some bigger operation runs away with his idea.
“The main reason why I finally said, ‘Yeah, we need to do this,’ is because you always hear about companies like Urban Outfitters or corporations that see a good thing and have the money to just press play and do it,” McClure said. “I was like, ‘We need to do that,’ because this is my idea and I don’t want somebody else to do the exact same thing.”
Looking east over Lake Union and toward Amazon’s growing campus, the Skylinyl guys see opportunity. They think their art makes sense in the hallways and offices of any number of tech-minded businesses — and in front of the eyeballs of Seattle’s expanding, young tech workforce.
But the ironic thing is that the city’s changing skyline could ultimately impact McClure’s artwork.
“I’m going to have to re-up the design every few years with Amazon buildings going up these days,” McClure joked.
