A lot of ideas, businesses and bands have started in Charlottesville — including the independent record label Jagjaguwar.
While Darius Van Arman relocated the imprint to Bloomington, Indiana, several years after its 1996 founding, he’s marking the imprint’s 30th anniversary with 4 reissues — a series being called “The Virginia Years.”
Van Arman, like so many others, wound up in town to attend the University of Virginia. He initially studied math but said he wasn’t fully invested in academics. Finding a sense of camaraderie in the early-90s rock scene, he started going to house shows — in part, he said — because there really weren’t other places for “left-of-center” bands to play.
It led him to start booking performances in the basement of a now long-gone sushi restaurant, Tokyo Rose.
Atsushi Miura owned the business and instituted open mic sets that soon developed into Van Arman booking a mix of local and national acts, each plying a low-fidelity aesthetic. Neutral Milk Hotel, Bill Callahan, Oneida and a raft of others performed at the restaurant during their ascent to indie-scene credibility.
Van Arman said that booking those performances made him feel like he was a part of something bigger.
“It was off the beaten path,” he said recently, speaking from Brooklyn, where Jagjaguwar and its affiliated Secretly Group has an office. “It wasn't on The Corner of the University of Virginia…. It's just a sushi restaurant in a strip mall. You would have no idea that it was a music venue. So, you kind of had to know it was somewhere to go, and you had to know where to look for where the show listings were to be part of that community.”
“A Derby Spiritual” by the Richmond band Drunk was the imprint’s second release — and the first to be reissued as a part of Jagjaguwar’s anniversary campaign. The band hadn’t played Charlottesville when it contacted Van Arman about releasing its music, but the label head was immediately intrigued. He said the troupe’s rich layering of acoustic instruments still has a timeless quality about it.
A few months after it was released, Van Arman said, Melody Maker reviewed “A Derby Spiritual,” and a distribution company subsequently ordered 50 copies of the CD.
It was the beginning of the label in earnest.
“I wasn't really approaching doing a label with conviction yet,” he said about releasing the imprint’s first album, The Curious Digit’s “Bombay Aloo.” “It was when the second one came out, it was like, OK now that there's two of these records out in the world on Jagjaguwar, this is actually a thing.”
Each of the early releases reveled in a unique sonic world, whether it was the Curious Digit’s fractured singer-songwriter work, Drunk’s worldly acoustic perspective or the ambient music of another Richmond band, South — which issued its only album on the label in 1998 and is included in the reissue campaign.
The Union Of A Man And A Woman was something altogether different: skittering guitar, and roiling bass and drums. The trio made an appearance at the Tokyo Rose one evening amid a raft of players with acoustic instruments best suited for an open mic.
“Most people that were there were probably annoyed, because they were hoping for some soft, plaintive singer-songwriter music,” Van Arman said about first seeing the Union. “These three high school kids just performed this incredible set. And so, of course, I was excited about possibly working with them.”
Kurt Beals remembers that night, too. He’s now a professor at the University of Richmond, where he’s focused on experimental 20th-century German literature.
In 2023, he published a new translation of Herman Hesse’s “Steppenwolf,” but during the ’90s he was a Staunton teenager in a basement with two of his friends, banging away in the Union. Van Arman released the trio’s only recording, 1998’s “The Sound Of The Union Of A Man And A Woman.” It’s set to be reissued in June.
Before he was out of high school, the bassist and vocalist, along with guitarist John Harouff and drummer Neil Campbell recorded “The Sound” at WGNS. Its stuttering rhythms tied the younger band to regional forebears exploring post-hardcore: “Are Your New Shoes Fit for the New Dance?” showcases at least four rhythmic patterns in as many minutes as the trio wades through sheets of wavering distortion.
Beals — who later played in the band Pterodactyl, another noisy rock outfit, before turning to academia — linked his music and research proclivities: “There is kind of a connection, that the Dada, experimental and avant-garde strain runs through both my literary interests and my musical interests.”
He said, at the time, the Union was treated like scene Wunderkinds and reflected on the ensemble being an outlier among its peers.
“Tons of people were in bands in high school, but a lot of them were kind of writing Nirvana and Pearl Jam knockoffs at that time,” he said. “I do get some satisfaction from looking back at it and saying what we were doing then was genuinely weird and unusual and experimental.”
But within a year of releasing the Union’s album, Van Arman decamped for Indiana.
While booking an earlier tour, he’d connected with Chris Swanson, the founder of Secretly Canadian, and the two stayed in touch. Swanson, Van Arman said, eventually invested in Jagjaguwar on the condition that he relocate. In 1999, Secretly was a bit bigger than Van Arman’s endeavor, and a bit more established.
The label founder said he appreciated the kind of hands-on DIY culture he encountered after moving his homebase to Bloomington. More fully adopting that ethos was also necessary to keep his imprint going.
“They were so environmentally conscious — but also cost conscious — that they never wanted to buy new boxes [for shipping albums],” Van Arman recalled. “We would do these pilgrimages every week behind grocery stores; we learned the times grocery stores would get rid of their corrugated boxes, and we would go and harvest those boxes from the dumpsters.”
Since leaving the commonwealth more than 20 years ago, the one-time UVA math student’s expanded Jagjaguwar’s reach and scope, issuing music by an array of performers, like Bon Iver, Dinosaur Jr., Angel Olsen and Jamila Woods.
It’s a significantly greater territory to cover — and a different business landscape to work in.
“I think it's just so much harder to start a label now,” Van Arman said. “It's just the way culture sort of takes off now. It's much more cash intensive and it's harder to have those sparks of luck that Jagjaguwar had. But it's not impossible.”