A Brief, Subjective History of Jagjaguwar
E. Deines
Midway through his long, earnest and often very funny essay on the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons for a September 2006 issue of The Believer, author Paul La Farge proposes that D&D is not a game at all, but rather a ritual.
La Farge notes the marked difference between game and ritual. As games seek to demonstrate how unequal or distinct players and teams are from each other, rituals seek to do the opposite. “Ritual, on the other hand, is the exact inverse: it conjoins, for it brings about a union,” La Farge writes, himself quoting anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. “Or in any case an organic relation between initially separate groups.”
Across the twenty-year history of Jagjaguwar, an independent record label named, curiously, using a Dungeons & Dragons character-name-generating computer program, we find this idea of ritual as conjoining practice. We see it early on when Jagjaguwar joins forces with another Midwestern label. We see it in how these labels then find community with other like-minded record labels. We see it in the familial relationships between Jagjaguwar artists. And we see it in collaborations among Jagjaguwar artists.
In the back half of the 1990s, University of Virginia sixth-year senior Darius Van Arman was plumbing the depths of collegiate malaise, finding every odd job and wild-hair interest to keep himself from finishing his undergraduate degree — all while funds from back home outside of Washington D.C. were being severed. He was a music director at UVA's WTJU, a clerk at Plan 9 Records, art director at Charlottesville, Virginia's alt-paper C-Ville Weekly, overnight supervisor for an adult-care facility and booking shows at The Tokyo Rose, a basement venue beneath a sushi restaurant in a strip mall, where the likes of Sleater-Kinney, Neutral Milk Hotel, Cat Power, Will Oldham and countless others performed.