Today at Asthmatic Kitty we are launching a new project we’re calling "Labels by Alphabet." Each week we’ll move through the alphabet and post a new writeup and akradio playlist that highlights a different label. Today we start with anticon., which you can read by clicking here. Michael Kaufmann, A&R/Development here at AK, elaborates:

"I have the alphabet on my brain. I think this is connected to my 3 year old son’s addiction to Elmo. Or maybe it’s the librarian in me, a need for taxonomy and order. Regardless, I have a fascination with working my way through the alphabet. In its first incarnation, my family and I ate our way through the alphabet of fine family dining establishments: Applebee’s, Bennigan’s, Cheeseburger in Paradise, Don Pablo’s, etc. Now that I have had my fair share of laminated menus and exploding chocolate desserts, I’ve turned my life cataloging skills to record labels — from the corporate sellers of bottomless nachos to the music industry’s small business owners.

Asthmatic Kitty is going to take the next few months to celebrate labels we feel have integrity and good taste. Every week we will celebrate a different record label and provide you with a brief description in the sidebar as well as a streaming radio playlist in our akadio player. We want to acknowledge and honor folks who are doing things their own way and releasing music that is important for the world to hear. We also want to take a moment and do the exact opposite of what we should be doing, promoting others instead of ourselves. Not because we want to fake some sort of virtuous humility, but because sometimes the best business decisions are counter-intuitive. Supporting and promoting independent music in general is good not only for these other businesses but our own.

We know in our hearts it’s the right time to do this, to point folks to some new, independent and important music. Consider the music scene’s current climate. i.e. ad revenue supported streaming; social neckworking [sic]; co-branding with corporate style brokers; and the the criminalizing of music discovery via peer-to-peer file sharing.

Ok, sometimes we’re a bit slow to intriguing things on the Internet. In fact, we are just now discovering, with great joy, "Paint My Album." Last year a couple guys from Manchester, UK decided to redo classic album art with the prolific Microsoft Paint (aka MS Paint – wikipedia article here). As things like this on the internet are prone to do, the idea snowballed. There are now over 1300 submitted album covers. You can see them on the project’s webpage right here.

Unfortunately, we feel like AK is under-represented. And hopefully, that’s where you come in. We’d like to compile an index, even if just for our own benefit, of our entire catalog redone in MS Paint. Alex Bristow of Bristol knocked out Enjoy Your Rabbit, and Alex Grantham of Manchester took care of Illinois (note lack of spandex-donned Superhero). But we would love to see more!

If you’re up to the challenge, we’ll give you something in return. For each decentish attempt at recreating an AK album cover in MS Paint, we’ll thank you by giving you digital downloads of DM Stith’s BMB EP, and our as-of-yet unreleased brand new AK sampler.

Our favorite submissions will get a choice from digital downloads of Shannon Stephens’ The Breadwinner, Castanets Texas Rose, The Thaw, and The Beasts, and Royal City’s self-titled retrospect.

We’ll post all the redone album art on our Flickr account, and highlight our favorites in a news item here on asthmatickitty.com. For details, click on more.

Email the image, which must have been created exclusively in MS Paint, to [email protected]. Include the following:

Your Full Name
Your hometown, state, and country
The image at 350pixels x 350 as an attachment
Your website (if applicable).

Album art is available on each release page here on asthmatickitty.com.

We reserve the right to end this contest at any time.