Matthew Crook has been teaching history and sociology at Battle for the past six years, but he does more than just teach history. Crook won the Progress in Arts award on November 29th of this year.
Crook is a founder of Dismal Niche Records and an integral part of the Columbia Experimental Music Festival (CEMF) which brings artists from across the world to Columbia, to perform and to give people of Columbia experiences that they wouldn’t have had the chance to otherwise.
Dismal Niche started as a cassette tape label in 2013. It was formed to keep members of the Columbia punk and experimental scene together after Hair Hole, a venue in the North Village Arts District, closed.
Hair Hole was a huge part of the Columbia experimental music scene, allowing them to gather and share their passion for their unique sounds. This year was the last year of the CEMF which happened between November 2 to November 5. However, it’s not the end of the Dismal Niche studio. They still plan on having shows and events, just none on the level of CEMF.
“I bear all of the financial risks of CEMF and even though it has been doing well throughout its life, it’s hard to maintain it on a teacher’s salary,” Crook said.
Even though Dismal Niche and CEMF are incredibly successful, it is still a non-profit organization and event, so the planners and leaders spay what they can through state, county, or government grants that Mr. Crook and others write.
They write grant essays for everything they want to accomplish; they also get funds from things such as holding fundraisers and acquiring sponsors. They do have to pay everything else that the funding doesn’t cover out of pocket, so the artists can come over with their equipment and have a place to stay and also just to have venues booked.
Some artists from this year’s performances are The Sun Ra Arkestra, a group formed in the mid-1950s and that’s still going on tours and performances through its seventy-year span of being a band with all but one of its original members, and Zep France, a twenty-two-year-old hip-hop artist from Kansas City with over sixty-two thousand monthly listeners on Spotify.
The CEMF is not just limited to musical performances–there were screenings of a documentary called “Rewind and Play” about jazz artist Thelonious Monk. In the past CEMF has had artists from Ukraine and Nigeria.
“It’s not explicitly experimental in that every show and every artist are just weird or anything like that,” Crook said. “But, it’s more of an experiment in putting all of these different genres and different artists together over the course of a weekend.” Crook has no plans on ever making Dismal Niche a for-profit organization saying,
“The name kind of says it all, we’re putting out experimental music that’s not easily accessible or easily consumed which is kind of how we want it to be.”
