You may remember Elliot Earls from a Tape Op interview in issue #14, but we'll come back to that. Emigre is a magazine published by husband and wife Rudy Vanderlans and Zuzana Licko. Early issues were almost zine like with a pop culture feel, but the magazine quickly turned into the bible for the then exploding DIY graphic design community who had discovered the Macintosh computer as a powerful new tool. Licko went on to design typefaces (along with pottery and pajamas ?!) for Emigre, many of which have become almost completely integrated into our visual culture, while Vanderlans focused on the magazine, book publishing and whatever else struck his creative fancy. At one point, Rudy started an Emigre record label and worked with artists like Basehead, The Grassy Knoll, Super Collider, Ui and others before abandoning the money sucking idea. In the past year however, Vanderlans has grown tired of the conservative, derivative and stale design community and decided to return to his love of music, which if you followed the magazine was never very far away anyway with pieces on 4AD/Vaughn Oliver and recent self-published monographs (with musical accompaniment) on Gram Parsons, Van Dyke Parks and Captain Beefheart. Starting with issue #60, Vanderlans has become a modern day patron of difficult music and changed Emigre from a standard sized magazine to a half sized magazine in a pressboard mailer with a free CD enclosed. Recent issues of the mag featured Honey Barbara and The Grassy Knoll. This isn't the first major change for the magazine which originated as an oversized two color magazine, then went to standard size, then to full color with a free distribution to their mailing list of 25,000 regular customers of their typefaces and small press books on graphic design. (Emigre's business model was one of the inspirations for Tape Op's current business structure.) Issue #62 is a landmark issue however and anyone involved in the indie music scene should check it out. Bundled with the issue is the latest project from Elliot Earls, a feature length DVD, Catfish. The magazine itself, aside from a feature on Earls, has an eloquently written essay by Kenneth Fitzgerald on why independent DIY publishing and indie labels are so vital and important to our culture. And then there's the DVD of Catfish. This is flat out the most amazing thing I've seen come out of the desktop digital DIY revolution to date. Earls is a master of just about every creative technology that can be put on a computer, and Catfish is his tour de force. At once a monograph for his visual art and music (this is his third 'album' of songs) it is also a feature film unlike anything I've ever seen. Imagine David Lynch at his absolute most non-linear, bizarre best collaborating with The Beatles on Help! had it been done with today's technology and you have an idea of what this mixture of music, film, art, design and poetry is like. ($7.95,www.emigre.com)