VARIOUS
ENCYCLOPEDIA ASTHMATICA VOL.1 (ASTHMATIC KITTY)
The Encyclopedia Asthmatica is a collection of Asthmatic Kitty Records visuals; the odd, the sublime, and the delectable.
It also includes stop-animation menus meticulously captured from the artistic imagination of Gala and Zack Bent, set to characteristic music arrangements by jingle-virtuoso Rafter Roberts.
Nearly all of the Asthmatic Kitty Records' roster, and many of their friends, make an appearance somewhere on this DVD: from the playful choreography of the Think Dance Collective frolicking in shoes made of bread to the music of Half-handed Cloud, to the lovely abstraction of Sufjan Stevens' projectionist, Deborah Johnson; from the haunting and raw post-apocalypse video fuzz of live Castanets, to the crisp color footage of My Brightest Diamond at Northsix, there are visual pieces that hopscotch the chasm between the professionalism of a music-visual DVD to the rabid eccentricity of a five-copy, underground video-zine.
Asthmatic Kitty is known for its creative fanbase, and so this disc also includes the winner of the Rafter YouTube video contest.
The label's patent homemade aesthetic is here too, with Bunky's bizarre yet appropriate space alien video, and a selection from Liz Janes that employs found footage.
The Shapes and Sizes videos turn the incidental and accidental into a hidden design, while a video from the Curtains subverts the banality of surveillance video by rendering it magical.
Stop-animated menus and DVD digipak design by award-winning, internationally exhibited artists Zack and Gala Bent.
Four videos of previously unseen Sufjan Stevens video and live footage. Also includes illustrator Tom Eaton's "Put the Lights on the Tree." Previously unseen live footage of Castanets, My Brightest Diamond, Shapes & Sizes, and Bunky.
Includes winner of Rafter YouTube video contest.