Joe Wigdahl, Chris Strong, and Ed Menacho admit they were a bit green when they launched Brilliante Records in the summer of 2002. The three friends, who met at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the late 90s, started the label to release an EP by the Milwaukee quartet Camden. The band had already broken up, but its previous album had sold about 3,000 copies, and two members had since joined the popular emo act the Promise Ring. “We thought in the beginning because we were so crazy about the EP that [with] the buzz over [the Promise Ring] people would just buy it without advertising or anything,” Wigdahl says. “We were pretty naive.” They pressed 2,000 copies, but they’ve sold only about 500 so far.
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Most people who start indie labels are music fans first and entrepreneurs second, and the enthusiasm that sustains such projects doesn’t always survive the onset of economic reality. Yet Brilliante and Flameshovel are hanging in there. Neither is turning a profit yet, but both teams of owners remain optimistic, and the labels fill a void in the Chicago scene, putting out records by the kind of local arty guitar-based rock bands that Thrill Jockey, Drag City, and Touch and Go haven’t signed in years.
It took them more than six months to get the Camden EP out, finishing just in time to miss the Promise Ring’s big summer tour. In the meantime William Seidel and Ryan Weber, the two ex-Camden members, offered the label the debut release from their dance-pop project, New Sense, and Menacho struck up a relationship with the Athens guitar-pop outfit the Eskimos. In the fall of 2002 the label agreed to put out an EP by Caviar: the local four-piece, led by Fig Dish vets Blake Smith and Mike Willison, had been dropped by Island and wanted to remain visible while shopping for a new major-label deal. Though it’s sold only about 600 copies, the Caviar EP is Brilliante’s most successful release so far.
Woghin quit his job in October 2002 to work on the label full-time. “I realized that I would rather be broke and do what I really want to do and try to make it work out,” he says. Kenler followed suit a few months later. He relies on occasional freelance work and an inheritance to pay the bills, while Woghin scrapes by on his savings. Neither draws a salary from the label, although they’re both confident that the situation will soon change.
