Todd Kurnat, aka Ink Letterman, aka DJ Circuit 73
Todd Kurnat is everywhere.
In this episode, meet and get to know Todd. These days, he’s also known as Ink Letterman for his art and DJ Circuit 73 for his musical stylings. We begin in Michigan.
Both sets of Todd’s grandparents grew up in Greenville, Michigan, about an hour outside Grand Rapids. His parents met in high school in that small town. They eventually moved to Grand Rapids, the big city in that part of the world. His dad worked at a transportation company and his mom was a nurse at St. Mary’s Hospital. It was the early Seventies—around 1972 or so.
Todd was born in 1973. His mom had done some college, and his dad had joined the US military to teach about weapons-grade rockets. He was never deployed to Vietnam. Todd says that engineering DNA in his dad runs through him, although Todd uses it for less destructive ends.
Sometime after Todd came around, the family moved to Johnston Street, still in the inner-city part of Grand Rapids. The neighborhood had access to downtown. Todd spent a lot of time riding his BMX bike around the area with friends. Eventually, bikes gave way to skateboards, which he took all over his city. But we’ll get to that.
His earliest memories on Johnston Street involve playing in the front yard—baseball and football with kids from the hood. In the backyard, they had a basketball hoop. Eventually, Todd was joined by two younger sisters and a younger brother. He remembers spending a lot of time with his sisters before his brother was born when Todd was 13.
Another of Todd ‘s earliest memories involve listening to music. His dad had an 8-track player that Todd used a lot. Those tapes made him so happy that he’d run around the house doing laps. The radio was also on a lot in Todd’s house.
Todd went to Catholic school until his early high school years. One day, his mom showed up at his private school, got him out, and said, “we’re leaving.” Both his parents worked to support themselves and their (at the time) three kids. But changes had to happen, and so they put their oldest kid in public high school. It proved to be a life-changing move for Todd.
Right away, he made new friends, a few of which have proved to be life-long buddies. The common thread for them was music and movies. Bikes and skateboards, too. Speaking of bikes …
Around age 12, Todd had a newspaper route. Because he already had a bike when the BMX craze really took off, around the mid-Eighties, he followed that. He and his friends eventually started riding their bikes on street ramps. They also built and rode on dirt tracks.
BMX gave way to skateboarding when Todd was 13 or 14. For a minute, he did both, but then someone stole his bike. Like me, skate videos got him hooked—videos from Powell Peralta featuring pro skaters like San Francisco’s own Tommy Guerrero. And it wasn’t just the skating in the videos that impressed Todd—he also dug the music enough to record it from VHS to cassette tape.
Toward the end of his high school days, Todd taught himself to play guitar. He bought a four-track Tascam recorder and started experimenting with it. He did stuff on his own, but also joined with some friends to form a band called Landis. They played for most of the rest of the Nineties.
Relevant to who Todd would become years later, a lot of the existence of Landis involved him screwing around with different configurations and recording locations. Think: experimental, but not necessarily falling into the so-called experimental genre.
After high school, Todd moved to Denver and kept playing music. He and two roommates called their Colorado group The Suspect. They played a couple shows. Todd and I go on a sidebar on playing live vs. recording vs. writing songs. Live was always my favorite, and Todd agrees.
Moving to Denver was all about escaping Grand Rapids, seeing a little bit of the world, and going to art school. He studied illustration and graphic design. He’d been drawing and doodling about as far back as he could remember. In high school, at the public school his mom put him in, there was a counselor who had steered Todd in the direction of graphic design, and he’s grateful for that. Turns out he has spent the better part of the last 30 years doing graphic design.
We end Part 1 with Todd looking back on how much technology has advanced since he got started in the digital art world.
In Part 2, we begin with Todd and me rapping about how much digital technology has changed just in our lifetimes.
Even when he was in school in Colorado, San Francisco had been a goal for Todd, a destination. He got his impression of The City from skateboarding magazines and TV shows. But before moving here, Todd went to Europe, as he puts it, “chasing a girl.” He even tried living overseas. When that didn’t work out, he moved back to Grand Rapids to save money. In 2001, he made the big move west.
When Todd arrived, he had a job already lined up for him. He just needed to find a place to live. He’d respond to Craigslist ads for apartments, but when he showed up to look at one of them, a roommate situation, it had turned into a party. He got the place, his first San Francisco apartment, at Waller and Masonic. Todd takes a moment to reminisce about living in that area, which he’s continued to do in the many years since he moved to San Francisco. His walk down memory lane leads us to the Lower Haight.
Todd met a lot of cool people at that first SF job, a dotcom, naturally. One of those coworkers had a separate office space in the Lower Haight that served as an auxiliary pressing plant for a record-pressing company based in the Czech Republic. That coworker was bailing on their job and handed the space and the gig over to Todd. It put him face-to-face with musicians in need of vinyl to be pressed. He handled album art as well. His worlds of art and music were colliding in meaningful ways. He quit his dotcom job to do this new gig full-time under the name Circuit 73. More on that later.
In addition to the record-pressing gig, Todd was doing flyer art for a friend’s monthly zine as well as other various flyer work. He also did album artwork. Two friends who were new at the time were looking for a space to open a music gear store. They ended up in the same space in the Lower Haight where Todd based himself. Todd’s graphic design work really started to take off around this time, the early 2000s.
He’d only been in San Francisco a couple of years, but Todd felt like he was where he needed to be. I ask Todd whether, all those years ago, he had a plan for how long he would try his new city out. He says he didn’t, but back then, he felt like he wouldn’t be here the rest of his life. And yet, more than 20 years later, here we are.
Then we turn to one of Todd’s alter egos/pseudonyms/whatever you wanna call its—Ink Letterman. That persona was born when Todd got his first Instagram account, around 2014 or so. He wanted an alias, and landed on that. It took off around 2020, when he started doing mural work in the early days of the pandemic.
Rewinding a bit, Todd started DJing under the name Circuit 73 (another alias) around 2005 or so. He eventually took a lot of time off from music, though. His growing collection of physical media started to make him anxious, so he stopped buying records. He also started a family in this time. Eventually, digital music platforms more or less solidified, so that helped. He also started listening to KUSF/90.3 FM.
Being in an office, sitting in front of a computer, it all led to burnout as well. His son was born in 2015 and he semi-retired from graphic design to focus on being a parent and leaning in more to his art (and away from design). Todd’s art is part of a group show curated by Known SF and 415 Zinethat’s up now through August 24 at Mini Bar.
Eventually, DJing came back into Todd’s life. He’s quick to give credit to KEXP/92.7 FM for roping him back in. Another source of inspiration is his son, Oscar. He loves music as much as his dad does, and the two listen together quite a lot. Todd points to both the quantity and the quality of new music in the recent past. He’s excited about a surge in old music being reissued as well. He’s got a monthly gig, last Friday of every month, as DJ Circuit 73 at 540 Bar on Clement. And his radio show, Directions in Stereo, is on KXSF/102.5 FM every Monday from 10 p.m. to midnight.
We end the episode with Todd plugging himself. Follow him on Instagram @inkletterman. Find him on Soundcloud @circuit73.
We recorded this podcast in Golden Gate Park in June 2026.
Photography by Dan Hernandez
