Morgan Slade’s love for vinyl dates back to the 1980s. Growing up in Los Angeles, he heard plenty of what his parents were spinning — a combination of The Rolling Stones and Donna Summer — but when someone brought albums by Black Sabbath, Devo and Black Flag to a family gathering, everything changed.
“My mind was blown,” he says. “Me and my friends, we’d get on the bus in LA, and we would go around and buy records whenever we had money every week. That’s how it started.”
As for how it’s going, Slade is no longer just a collector. He recently crossed over to the other side, having founded a new Richmond-based label called Blank Verse Records. He hopes to empower bands with dreams of pressing their music to vinyl, and in a way that honors each album as the interdisciplinary artistic opportunity that it is.
“I want to celebrate these artists,” Slade says. “That look and feel is such a big part of it.”
Slade’s own journey as an artist, designer and photographer includes a 1991 fine arts degree from the University of California at Santa Cruz and exhibits in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Richmond, Washington, D.C. and Sweden. These days his work is represented by Quirk Gallery, the art space just footsteps from the lobby of Quirk Hotel, where Slade serves as general manager.
The hotel business brought him to Richmond around a decade ago. He’d been living north of San Francisco, though much of his time was spent on the road helping different hotels open their doors or open onsite retail spaces. Quirk was on that list. Richmond reminded Slade of his stint living in San Francisco in the 1990s.
“When I was traveling so much,” he says, “you either get off the plane and you roll into a city and you feel comfortable, or you’re like, ‘I gotta get out.’ And when I got to Richmond, I was like, ‘Oh, I totally understand this. This is straight up my alley.’”
Finding an audience
The city figures prominently on Blank Verse’s artists page. While the label’s physical catalog contains just two volumes to date, forthcoming pressings from saxophonist Charles Owens, Palm Palm guitarist Charlie Glenn and dance-punk outfit Knifing Around, among other Richmonders, would seem to give Blank Verse a local flavor. But Slade plans to cast a wide net, both geographically and stylistically.
“I don’t know that my tastes are always in line with the status quo,” he says. “We’ll find the market to put these records out, and sometimes that’s not just in your local community. You have to search for a broader audience for some of these things, which I think is beneficial to all the artists that sign up.”
First to sign up was Charlie Glenn. The standout multi-instrumentalist has been running like hell alongside his Palm Palm compatriots in 2025, thanks to the hotly anticipated release of that band’s debut album, “Natural Anthem.” But in late 2024, Glenn shared a full-length of his own called “Get Reflected.” Slade and Glenn were chatting about it, and “a few drinks later,” plans were in place for a vinyl run. “We shook hands like, ‘Let’s make a record here.’ We’re still working on that… He’s got to finish up the cover, but Charlie has been busy with Palm Palm, so we have to let him go be a rockstar.”
Blank Verse’s first release to reach vinyl enthusiasts was from an artist based outside of Virginia — Nan Macmillan’s “From Both Eyes.” Macmillan does have ties to Central Virginia, having studied poetry at the University of Virginia, but she now calls Brooklyn home as she writes contemplative, warmly arranged folk-pop.
Macmillan had planned to perform in Richmond but got sick and the show never happened. Slade, who was helping to organize the show, decided to check her music out anyway. Impressed, he reached out via email. “I was like, ‘By the way, I know that this [show] didn’t work out, but I’m doing this project. Do you want to meet and talk about it?’ And it just happened that she was super-organized, had all of her stuff together [and] ended up being first.”
“She has such an honest voice and sound,” Slade says. “I’m gonna sell that record until this whole thing explodes. I think it’s that good.”
Not all artists are quite as poised to press vinyl. Slade notes that bands accustomed to uploading albums to streaming services or Bandcamp may not be thinking about how a record has both a front and back cover. “Every artist is in sort of a different stage,” he says. “Some are more organized than others, and that’s just the nature of the game. But I want to be able to take the time for each person. Whatever that takes is what it takes.”
Embracing exploration
The label’s second physical release arrived on Aug. 8. “Embrace the Grift,” the new album from the Richmond-based experimental pop band Opin, exemplifies what’s possible when label and artist work hand in hand to elevate the presentation of a set of songs.
Opin brings together three multi-instrumentalists steeped in collaboration — Landis Wine and Tori Hovater, who had previously teamed up in the rock band White Laces, and former Navi guitarist Jon Hawkins. Opin’s self-titled debut arrived in 2017, establishing a set of early strengths — an embrace of electronic elements and a knack for mining murky musical realms — that dovetailed with White Laces’ latter efforts. Those strengths underlie “Embrace the Grift” as well, though the group’s compositional approach took a turn around the time of the COVID-19 pandemic.
You can hear that shift in action on the “Hospital Street” series, a trilogy of mixtapes compiling improvisational loose ends the band captured at their practice and recording space of the same name. Hospital Street became a creative refuge as the band navigated through and away from the COVID-19 pandemic. The group would plug in, hit record and just play. “We would all be doing this at the end of a long work day, and sitting down and, you know, music and playing it was really cathartic.”
At first the band attempted to relearn and retrofit the best moments from those sessions in the live setting. Gradually, they wrapped their new process around them as a new collective identity. “We would always try to contort it back into something else,” Wine says. “I’m just like, ‘Yeah, but this isn’t really how we play. So why don’t we just start doing what we do naturally when we’re together?’”
Those hours of freeform catharsis instilled a sense of trust that empowers the band to take more risks with form and instrumentation, as they did during a beautifully informal-feeling afternoon set on the sidewalk outside Records & Relics in Church Hill the day after “Embrace the Grift” came out. “There is a point that we hit that we can all feel when we’re playing where we lose track of who’s doing what,” Wine says. “If we get to a point where we’re not sure who is making what sound or where that’s coming from, then that’s where we know we hit that spot. That’s where we can sort of luxuriate for a while.”
While “Embrace the Grift” does mete out the results of Opin’s collaborative work in portions of five minutes or fewer, the boundary-pushing remains, with plenty of twists and turns and passages of abstraction that double as synthesized sonic sculptures.
It’s fitting, then, that the album’s jacket should sport what could easily double as fine art. Julia Wine, Landis’ wife, created the angular cover art at the urging of Morgan Slade after Julia did print work for “Bodywork,” a single Opin released last fall. The package also features photography by Kelsy Hulvey — from a shoot outside the Mechanicsville Turnpike Roses department store that roused enough suspicion among employees that the police appeared just as Hulvey was packing up her gear — as well as layout work by Slade himself.
“That was one of the things that was attractive to us,” Landis says of Blank Verse’s attention to every aspect of the vinyl package. “We really wanted it to be a situation in which somebody was going to be a good custodian of the work as a whole. Even though, obviously, what’s recorded is important, the rest of the actual physical thing is really important to us.”
Opin to input
Slade also weighed in on the album’s sequencing. Band members had kicked around a few different iterations amongst themselves in the friendly confines of Hospital Street, first toying with the idea of starting both sides with the same song in an effort to throw listeners off, then making that sleight of hand real by chopping up an instrumental tune called “Pinches.” Yet it was Slade’s input that helped them find the final track listing.
“He actually came down and sat in the studio while we were going through stuff,” Wine says of Slade. “It was really great to be able to get somebody who had not only perspective, but also a literal and figurative investment in the project to do that.”
Slade envisioned a version of “Embrace the Grift” that took listeners on a curated tour through Opin’s sometimes dark, always varied, synth-driven soundscapes. “It was very important that the A side and the B side are like two different stories,” he says.
That’s one of the joys of vinyl: taking a moment, as you walk across the room to flip an album halfway through, to consider the decision-making that went into the next sound you’re about to hear. For Slade, the second track doubles as a microcosm of that whole experience. “When you listen to ‘All Night Repeating,’ you’re like, ‘Okay, this sounds like the Opin I know, but they’re in a new place,’ and it’s also kind of where Opin is going.’”
Slade has been on a lifelong music journey of his own. As if managing Quirk, making intricately textured art, snapping incisive photographs and founding a new record label weren’t enough to keep him busy — he’s also a musician himself (“one of the things I find myself pretty good at is time management,” he notes). His current project is called Intertitle, and a listen to its 2022 self-titled EP reveals electronic music with clean lines and an alluring brightness.
Earlier on, post-punk was his canvas. “When I was making music and I was growing up, you had punk, you had this new wave, pop stuff that was happening… There were bands that were trying to make something out of all of that. The bands are doing the post-punk thing now — they’re definitely playing off the bands that were probably going nowhere in the ‘80s but were still making some really interesting things.”
The next verse
One band that’s found that same set of frequencies — and that certainly seems to be going places — is Knifing Around. The Richmond-based group balances driving, danceable backing and tremendous energy on the part of lead singer Owen Martin with pull-no-punches lyricism. “They have a lot of influences,” Slade notes, “and tend to wear them all at the same time, which is kind of cool.”
After establishing its sound via a trio of EPs and playing some of Richmond’s most sought-after stages — including Friday Cheers’ RVA Music Night in 2024 — Knifing Around is in the process of finalizing a debut full-length. It’s been another opportunity for Slade to provide guidance. “We sat down and went through what the album needed,” Slade says. The band delivered. “I’m super excited. I would actually do that sooner, but I think for them, we want to get everything right, so it’ll probably be next spring.”
One project Slade is hoping to complete before the end of the year is a first-ever vinyl pressing of the 2021 album by jazz saxophonist Charles Owens’ trio, “10 Years.” The idea of reissuing the 10-song set, which begins with a song named after the trio’s bassist, Cameron Ralston, and ends with this writer’s favorite version of “Rainbow Connection” not sung by Kermit the Frog, arose about a year ago. Slade remembers saying to Owens, “‘This probably gonna take a little bit longer, because it’s a longer record, and I kind of want you to sit with it for a bit.’ Because, in my head, I wanted to rework the artwork and do something fresh.’”
For many artists, the prospect of pressing vinyl would make swapping out cover art an easy call. But the art for “10 Years” is the work of Jessica Camilli, also known as Rapid Eyes, or the artist with whom Owens collaborates regularly and intentionally. It’s as noticeable and symbiotic a cross-disciplinary partnership as you’ll find in Richmond music scene; even the quickest glance at the cover of 2022’s “Golden Moments” album — a hypnotic portrait of Owens — is indelible. It took seeing the updated “10 Years” art for Owens to sign off.
“It’s awesome,” Slade says. “We had to convince Chaz a little bit to change it, because he’s so married to that record. But once he saw it, he was all in.”
Blank Verse’s focus on visual accompaniment goes beyond facilitating cover art. Rapid Eyes is actually listed on the label’s artists page, as are other visual artists including Chris Milk Hulburt, who has a project in the works that Slade describes as “half-art, half-music.” Slade also plans to create limited-edition pieces of artwork to sell alongside his label’s music — an extension of his long-standing love for concert posters and flyers, which he collected growing up.
“Everybody’s making these beautiful posters, this great album artwork, and it’s only shown in a very small size, and only digital,” he laments. His pitch to the visual artists affiliated with Blank Verse: “I want you guys to get credit, and I want you guys to get paid. That’s why it’s almost like a gallery model.”
The next Blank Verse release to hit shelves will be from Tyrone Sanborn Webster, a Southern California-based musician whose 2020 album, “Intention,” is, to Slade’s ears, “like Nick Drake and Radiohead had a baby together and made a very sublime folk-electronic record.” It’s another instance of Blank Verse giving an album that’s already made its way to streaming platforms a more ceremonious release — in this case, on opaque, white-and-pink vinyl.
Style interviewed Slade for this article from inside Common House, at a table overlooking a stretch of Broad Street within a shadow’s reach of dearly departed record store, Steady Sounds, owned by musician Marty Key. Slade spoke about the convenience of having such a trusted cornerstone of Richmond’s vinyl community close by, and about the time he got a call saying Robert Plant was staying in Richmond, just moments before the Led Zeppelin singer walked past with a bag of records from Steady Sounds.
Slade’s own collection — a joint effort with his wife, Carla Siqueiros — numbers in the thousands. “We have a room in the house that’s dedicated to listening,” Morgan says. “We’ll sit there on Sunday mornings. There’s always a record on.”
Siqueiros, a librarian by trade, is listed as a cofounder on Blank Verse’s website; the label’s about page states that its mission “is to empower emerging and established artists who share our passion for authentic, boundary-pushing music.” The name of the label was another intra-couple collaboration, resulting from time spent sitting outside and reflecting on how poetry that’s free from the constrictions of end rhyme aligns with the label’s cross-disciplinary, genre-agnostic aims.
Slade also credits his wife with moral support, and with behind-the-scenes organizational efforts. There’s plenty of wrangling to do with so many artists in the mix already — visual, musical and multi-medium. “Since this is the first year, there was a big push to get as much done as possible,” Slade says.
“It’s a little bit like the wine industry,” he continues. “You do all this work really quickly, and then you wait a month and a half… It sounds like a lot of work, but the artists are doing a lot of the work, too. I see it more as a collaboration. I want to support them as much as I can.”
To hear and purchase “Embrace the Grift” and to learn more about Blank Verse Records’ other releases, visit blankverserecords.com.
