Thrill Jockey Records Vinyl, CDs & Cassettes

Bettina Richards started Thrill Jockey in 1992 with $35,000 of personal and family capital while working at a record store in Hoboken, running the whole operation out of her New York apartment before moving the label to Chicago in 1995. She had come out of Atlantic Records' A&R department and had seen enough of how major labels worked to know she wanted to build something different, something where the music came first, and the artist kept half of everything.

That 50/50 profit share with artists has been the label's founding principle since day one, and it says something about the kind of operation Thrill Jockey has always been. The roster it attracted reflects the same values: artists who needed a home that understood what they were making and wouldn't try to sand the edges off it.

Tortoise became the anchor act of the label's early years and, in many ways, the defining sound of post-rock as a genre, patient and rhythmically intricate and genuinely unlike anything that had come before. The label expanded from there in every direction, Mouse on Mars, Matmos, Boredoms and OOIOO from Japan, Lightning Bolt bringing their bass-and-drums noise-metal from Providence, Jeff Parker's solo work extending the jazz-inflected thread that Tortoise started. Circuit des Yeux. Mary Lattimore. The range is wide, and the quality is consistent, held together not by genre but by a shared seriousness about the work.

Thirty-plus years in, Thrill Jockey is still independent, still Chicago-based, and still finding artists that nobody else would know what to do with.