It’s OK if an album doesn’t recoup its costs for 20 years, Bill Kellum says while sitting in his Albemarle County home office, surrounded by hundreds of LPs and CDs.
Kellum’s VHF Records has been releasing albums since the early 1990s, issuing work across shoegaze, electronic experimentation, stringband and improvised musics. Some of the groups he’s worked with have been based in Europe or Asia, but a fair amount of the VHF catalog’s been drawn from Virginia talent.
Kellum began performing in his own bands while studying at James Madison University, merging avant-rock and burbling electronics. The guitarist eventually settled in Northern Virginia and connected with the D.C.-area rock scene that at the time included Teenbeat Records acts like Unrest. He caught live shows at d.c. space and the 9:30 Club, but also traversed the Commonwealth playing and seeing live music, including a few notable Charlottesville bills.
“I remember seeing Sonic Youth at Trax in 1990. I saw Jesus Lizard, Superchunk, Mudhoney — all those bands — there,” he said. “Once you see a performance that really reaches you, up close without all the production, without it being 100 yards away from you, without there being a kind of showbiz aspect to it that's off-putting, it really rewires you.”
Watching those groups gain notoriety at the same time Kellum was beginning to release his own music demystified the industry a bit — and attending all those shows helped him meet a raft of likeminded performers who’d eventually issue music through VHF. Those encounters also made Kellum think his talents were best suited to label pursuits — not performing or setting up shows.
Mike Gangloff, a fiddler now based in Southwest Virginia, met the label owner in Richmond during the ’90s. Since then, he’s released more than a dozen albums through Kellum’s imprint.
“The kind of music that Bill has championed — it's been quite a range,” he said. “And while I think it all has a certain psychedelic, artsy kind of coherence … I'm not sure that there are many other small labels that have had the persistence and the range that he's had.”
Earlier this month, Gangloff, cellist Kaily Schenker and guitarist Jesse Sheppard released their debut recording as Universal Light through VHF. The group delves into a combination of Appalachian string music and “directed improvisation,” and has a brief tour through North Carolina and Virginia set for March.
Between his solo efforts, that Universal Light album, and work in The Black Twig Pickers and Pelt, Gangloff’s represented on an outsized number of VHF releases. He credits Kellum for supporting his various creative pursuits.
“The whole course that we took was aided by his releases and his mixing, and his giving us the gear to actually record the sounds in the first place,” he said about Pelt, which started issuing music in 1993.
Jack Rose, who’d go on to establish himself as a solo performer before passing away in 2009, was a member of the group with Ganloff for more than a decade. Rose’s finger-style playing helped reignite interest in a unique strain of American guitar music. Kellum counts his “Opium Musick” recording among his favorite VHF releases and said Rose’s “Kensington Blues” ranks as one of the imprint’s best-selling albums.
In a single sentence, the label owner described Rose as irascible, friendly and unpredictable.
“There's some American-primitive stuff and there are a couple of extended raga pieces on it,” Kellum said about “Kensington Blues,” explaining its appeal more than 20 years after its release. “It's just great from start to end.”
Kellum decided early in the label’s trajectory that he wasn’t going to make music a full-time gig. Today, he works an IT job for the Library of Congress, a position that enabled him to relocate to Central Virginia during the pandemic.
The move connected him to the land — all 21 acres of his property — and in some ways to Gangloff’s work, drawn from the history of Appalachian music.
“The lens I kind of see this all through is the indie underground, homemade-handmade background,” Kellum said. “I came to understand the stringband music later. … I think wanting to be here, wanting to have land, wanting to have touch with nature has a kind of similar tactile quality to being interested in DIY — interested in the counterculture or alternative ways of thinking.”
VHF never moved a ton of merchandise, despite releasing Rose’s briskly selling work, as well as a number of recordings by the well-regarded British group Flying Saucer Attack, Kellum said. And like the industry as a whole, sales have decreased over time. But making a mint wasn’t ever the imprint’s goal.
“The label is just a conduit for those people,” Kellum said about the musicians he’s met during that past 35 years. “I kind of think of it like the coolest restaurant in your town is probably not the big chain. It's a funky place that you like, that's not like anything else. The most interesting person you know is different from everybody else. And that's kind of where I think our music sits.”