The crowd went crazy when two young women took the stage at Rose Music Hall this past Friday, Nov. 4. As if the crowd was made up of native New Yorkers, they went even crazier when one of the girls announced they were coming all the way from Brooklyn. For those who missed it, this was the most accurate descriptor image for the rest of Columbia’s experimental music festival, Dismal Niche.
The seventh annual celebration took place in different venues throughout the weekend, and it hosted artists like H31R, R.A.P Ferreira, The Moody Pinks, and Godspeed You! Black Emperor among others. The festival also featured film screenings and after parties.
Two of the most illustrative concerts to sum up the event are H31R’s opening set and Lubomyr Meinyk’s set on Saturday.
H31R emanated the energy of the festival with their genre-bending music and free flowing verses. The group is made up of rapper maasai and producer JWords. Together, they brought entirely unique songs that differed from the one before and shocked the crowd alive for the remainder of the night. The setlist was mostly comprised of songs from their 2021 album Ve●loc●i●ty.
While this opening set to the festival created an energetic atmosphere, one of the closing sets for the festival on Saturday wrapped up the performances downtown for the day in a very ceremonial way.
Early Sunday morning, some Columbia churchgoers gathered at United Methodist Church to celebrate their faith. The night before, however, a different crowd came together to celebrate a different type of faith: an appreciation for the new and experimental.
Purple and magenta lights decorated the ceiling of the church, creating a celestial ambience when contrasted against the religious imagery of the place. The scene seemed out of Raymond Carver’s short story “Cathedral.”
Performing was Lubomyr Melnyk, accompanied by Jeremiah Chiu and Marta Sofia Honer. The German composer reminded Columbians of four different things also stated on his website with the arrangements performed.
“1) Every point in our world has its own definitive and unique sound, 2) Sound is NOT a wave, although it travels as a wave. 3) Sound is a Meta-Physical phenomenon, in the sense that it truly exists, and is not simply an “impression” made into our brain, and thereby into our consciousness, by the effects of vibrations in the air —- (as is the suggested by the scientific explanations of sounds and music …) Sound IS !! 4) Sound is a miracle, and therefore, MUSIC is the miracle of miracles.”
Dismal Niche did just what Melnyk preaches about. On a weekend, the grouping of exploratory musicians, composers and bands reminded Columbia, Missouri, about the miracle of music.