Various Join The Ritual

Midway through his long, earnest and often very, very funny essayon the role playing game Dungeons & Dragons in the September 2006issue of The Believer, writer Paul La Farge proposes that Dungeons &Dragons is not a game at all but rather a ritual. La Farge notes the marked difference between game and ritual.Whereas a game seeks to demonstrate how unequal or distinct players/teams are from one another, rituals seek to do the very opposite."Ritual, on the other hand, is the exact inverse, for it brings about aunion," La Farge writes, himself paraphrasing anthropologist ClaudeLevi-Strauss. "Or in any case an organic relation between the initiallyseparate groups." And so, across the 25-year history of Jagjaguwar, an independentrecord label curiously named using a Dungeons & Dragons namegenerator, we find this idea of ritual as a conjoining practice. Wesee it early on when Jagjaguwar joins forces with a midwestern labelcalled Secretly Canadian for a powerful fusion. We see it in familialrelationships and collaboration among Jagjaguwar artists, and theways those artists' most treasured collaborators make their ways to theJagjaguwar game board. Join The Ritual, the third piece of Jagjaguwar's 25th Anniversarycelebration, looks to pay homage to the labels and artists that, whetherthey know it or not, invited Jagjaguwar to the table, to this wild, darkmagic ritual of music. We're talking about independent titans like DragCity, Too Pure, K Records and Touch & Go. We're talking about heroeslike R.E.M., Slint, Stereolab and Tracy Chapman. These songs capturedthe imaginations of our founders Darius Van Arman and Chris Swanson- and ultimately, opened up worlds to them.