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Midway through his long, earnest and often very, very funny essay

on the role playing game Dungeons & Dragons in the September 2006

issue 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 a

union," La Farge writes, himself paraphrasing anthropologist Claude

Levi-Strauss. "Or in any case an organic relation between the initially

separate groups."

And so, across the 25-year history of Jagjaguwar, an independent

record label curiously named using a Dungeons & Dragons name

generator, we find this idea of ritual as a conjoining practice. We

see it early on when Jagjaguwar joins forces with a midwestern label

called Secretly Canadian for a powerful fusion. We see it in familial

relationships and collaboration among Jagjaguwar artists, and the

ways those artists' most treasured collaborators make their ways to the

Jagjaguwar game board.

Join The Ritual, the third piece of Jagjaguwar's 25th Anniversary

celebration, looks to pay homage to the labels and artists that, whether

they know it or not, invited Jagjaguwar to the table, to this wild, dark

magic ritual of music. We're talking about independent titans like Drag

City, Too Pure, K Records and Touch & Go. We're talking about heroes

like R.E.M., Slint, Stereolab and Tracy Chapman. These songs captured

the imaginations of our founders Darius Van Arman and Chris Swanson

- and ultimately, opened up worlds to them.