From a defunct DIY venue to a modernist chapel, Dismal Niche has spent years staging the improbable — and making it feel necessary.

It’s hard to foment a scene. It usually comes down to a few driven people who unite vision with persistence, who keep showing up even when the room’s half full and the sound guy’s late. In Columbia, Missouri — a college town of 130,000 tucked between St. Louis and Kansas City — that kind of work requires a special kind of delusion. It’s politically blue, culturally curious, and just isolated enough to make the improbable feel necessary. Touring traffic is rare. If you want it here, you build it.

For the past decade, Matthew Crook has been building it. The brains and muscle behind Dismal Niche, he founded the project in 2013 as a tape label and DIY show series, emerging from the ashes of Columbia’s Hair Hole venue. Early releases documented the local underground — ambient, drone, lo-fi folk, free improv — paired with one-off release shows. As the scene expanded, so did the catalog: less a brand than a loose archive of shared sensibility.

By 2015, Dismal Niche was staging the Columbia Experimental Music Festival, a four-day event that brought artists like Scott Tuma, claire rousay, Jeremiah Chiu & Marta Sofia Honer, Laraaji, Moor Mother, Makaya McCraven, Yasmin Williams, and the Sun Ra Arkestra to town. It was ambitious — and increasingly unsustainable. It was turning into a full-time job for Crook. The festival has given way to a smaller, more flexible model: a co-presented concert series with the “We Always Swing” Jazz Series featuring JJJJJerome Ellis, Hailu Mergia, Zoë Amba, and Shabaka Hutchings with harpist Charles Overton. The vision held. The risk dropped. This in addition to stand-alone shows Dismal Niche has programmed, including Jaimie Branch’s Fly or Die, Branch’s side-project Anteloper, Circuit des Yeux, Irreversible Entanglements, Marisa Anderson, SUMAC, and billy woods.

The label has continued under the name Profane Illuminations, now an outlet for improvised and collaborative recordings from artists like Patrick Shiroishi, Loren Connors, and Damon Smith. The releases are raw, process-driven, and often recorded in brief, unrepeatable sessions—capturing something fleeting, not polished.

Dismal Niche also curates film screenings that bridge sound, politics, and experimental culture. Recent events included Subotnick, a portrait of electronic music pioneer Morton Subotnick; Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV, screened at the Daniel Boone Library; and Soundtrack to a Coup d’État, a Cold War doc on jazz diplomacy and African decolonization.

And they’re still expanding. In September, Austrian guitarist Christian Fennesz will perform at Firestone Baars Chapel, one of Columbia’s most striking architectural spaces. The modernist sanctuary will serve as an immersive sonic chamber, its angles and acoustics reshaped by Fennesz’s signature wash of distortion and melody.

In Columbia, none of this is expected. That’s the point. Dismal Niche built it anyway. Those interested in supporting experimental music and listening culture in so-called flyover country can toss a few bucks their way during their spring fund raiser.

We talked to Matthew about Dismal Niche, Profane Illuminations, and making the impossible possible. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Randall: Tell me about the seeds of Dismal Niche.

Matthew: It started late 2012, early 2013. I was playing in some punk bands, just as kind of a way to get to know people here in town who were playing music and doing things like that. There was a DIY venue called the Hair Hole. I started the band Nevada Greene in the Hair Hole, which was more in line with what I was wanting to do once I had kind of met some people and played in some bands. Nevada Greene was more my…

What instrument?

Guitar. It was more my creative vision: long-form cinematic kind of ambient folk music. I started that band with Ben Chlapek, who’s an artist and designer in Chicago now. We’d been playing shows, and the Hair Hole was coming to an end. People were kind of scattering to the wind. The focus on that space was always to get a band together and play shows. A lot of cool bands played there. I remember Waxahatchee playing there before she was big. That was kind of the community hub for DIY music in town. And when that was slated to be demolished, Ben and I thought, let’s get people who have put all this time into music here in town to start recording some tapes and kind of hold things together in the interim while we find a new space — or at least have some sort of archive of the creative energy that was coming out of the Hair Hole.

We’d been talking about this for a while — like, let’s start a tape label. We didn’t know what we were going to call it. My brother was living in Seattle at the time, and when I would go visit him, we’d make our way down to Portland. On the way, there’s Astoria and there’s Dismal Nitch — N-I-T-C-H. That’s where Lewis and Clark were waiting on a shipment on the Pacific that didn’t come. A bad storm came in, and some people died. Now it’s just a pleasant bird-watching, hiking sort of spot outside of Astoria. We thought that was kind of a clever, self-deprecating name. We changed it from Nitch to Niche.

Eventually, we were putting out different tapes from bands locally and regionally. Usually we’d organize some sort of tape release show. By 2015, we thought, ‘We’re doing so many of these tape shows, we should have some sort of festival.’ So we held our first festival in 2015. We incorporated as a nonprofit that year as well.

Dismal Niche is a nonprofit?

Yep, 501(c)(3). In 2015, we had our first festival. There were some artists from out of town, but it was largely local and regional bands — Kansas City, St. Louis. Scott Tuma from Chicago, who was in Souled American.

Yep.

He’s one of my favorite artists. The music I was making at the time was similar to what he does. Real sparse, ambient folk type stuff. People would tell me ‘He’s a real recluse, you know. Scott doesn’t make it out to the mailbox unless there’s something really good there.’ Turns out Scott’s just a really nice guy and nobody had really ever asked him to play. So he came down here. He played at Ragtag in the theater with this beautiful video a friend of his had made: slow-moving aerial footage of Irish countryside. It was just breathtaking.

That was our first festival. And then that kind of became the thing: let’s do this regional thing, let’s get somebody that wouldn’t otherwise come to Columbia to come play this. Maybe if this goes well, we can get a couple more people each year. So that was 2015. That was Scott Tuma. 2016 was Laraaji.

Perfect.

Laraaji has since become a very good friend. He’s been here a couple of times. He did a performance on KOPN, two laughter meditation workshops, and performed at the chapel at Stephens College. In all, he performed about eight hours that year. Didn’t ask for much and was just a joy to have. The year after that we had Moor Mother, who played an abrasive set at Eastside Tavern. It was awesome. Jon Mueller from Wisconsin played that year too. As it kept going, more people started coming.

Were you getting state funding?

We were still getting city funding at this point. You know, $500 a year. We started getting a grant from the Missouri Arts Council. Not much though — maybe $2,000 between the two of them. This is 2017. In 2018, we had ONO from Chicago — legendary, transgressive punk band. We had Kath Bloom. She played at the library, which was beautiful, with Peggy Snow from the Cherry Blossoms.

Was it that room at the library where Marisa Anderson played?

Right. So Kath Bloom playing there was kind of our in at the library. I didn’t really know how to go about getting into the library for a show, but I really love libraries. I want free community experiences to happen in places like that. The thing with Dismal Niche is not just, can we get the weirdest music here – It’s about thinking differently about how we use space and how we relate with one another. So it’s a social experiment as much as a music experiment.

Having Moor Mother and Kath Bloom — this kind of thing is well accepted now with festivals like Big Ears. I think they started around the same time as we did, just with many more millions. We wanted different artists from different backgrounds in the same place at the same time. I don’t have a didactic program for what’s supposed to happen. I just want to foster conversations and see what comes from that.

For the first several years, we called it the Dismal Niche Music and Arts Festival. In 2018, we renamed it the Columbia Experimental Music Festival. That just more directly communicated what was happening. “Dismal Niche” is off-putting on purpose. But if everybody’s first response is, “It’s an experimental music festival,” we figured we might as well say that. In 2019, we brought Makaya McCraven. Yasmin Williams, for her first performance ever outside of [Virginia]. It was the first time she had ever been on a plane. She came to Columbia to play at the library [and] she opened for Mdou Moctar at Café Berlin. Julianna Barwick played at the chapel at Stephens.

And how did it draw?

It drew really well (for a market the size of Columbia). We took a big risk and were rewarded. I applied for a little more money from the city. We fundraised hard. Dismal Niche doesn’t have corporate sponsors, so we have to come up with the money ourselves. One way we raised money was through movie dinners—music films and cover bands. The first was Neil Young’s Human Highway, with a Neil Young cover band and a Devo cover band. We did Live at Pompeii with a Pink Floyd cover band and dinner. We did the Can documentary — maybe we had folks do Can music. Twin Peakswith pie and coffee. An Arthur Russell night with a band. Space Is the Place with what we called the Columbia Community Arkestra.

And then you brought the Arkestra.

Yeah, then we brought the Arkestra. All this time we were still doing a label, but it started to feel murky — what exactly we were doing. So we put the label aside. By 2019, we weren’t really doing the label anymore. And then the pandemic happened. So we started a new label to keep active and to keep artist conversations going during lockdown.

We called it Profane Illuminations, named after the Walter Benjamin concept. He’s someone I was reading a lot at the time. The idea of aura — being present when something happens — felt really resonant. He wrote Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, about how copying things makes them accessible, but also potentially dangerous when aestheticizing politics. I think a lot about that when programming. Profane Illuminations was a side project — just a way to keep artists in dialogue. Most of what we’ve released so far has been improvised, long-form pieces. But the goal is collaboration more than genre.

When I moved here in 2022, I was in the midst of a big Patrick Shiroishi obsession. And I was also into Luke Stewart. Can you talk about how you started working with Patrick?

Patrick’s good friends with Chaz Prymik (Lake Mary), who was on our board for a while and plays in a band with Patrick — Fuubutsushi. They’d been talking about collaborating for a long time. They have similar energy — prolific, fun, community-oriented, and also deep artists. Their music is heavy in a meditative, emotional way. We knew Luke from when he played with Makaya in 2019. That ensemble — Makaya McCraven, Luke Stewart, Joel Ross, and Jeff Parker — was a one-time thing. It happened at Café Berlin. It was rare and probably won’t happen again. So we knew Luke, and Chaz was working with Patrick — at that point they (Chaz and Patrick) were making an album, or four albums, all online during the pandemic. It came together naturally.

I met Chaz at the New Music Circle show where Jessica Ackerley and Patrick played. I’d swapped emails with Patrick before in LA, but that was the first time we met face to face. They were getting ready to go to Ryan Wasaba's place on the east side to record.

Right. We put out that session (also with Alex Cunningham and Damon Smith). It’s beautiful.

Are there particular challenges to doing this in mid-Missouri?

The whole thing is a challenge. There’s not a built-in crowd for this here. We can pull from Kansas City and St. Louis. And there’s a college here, so we do have adventurous thinkers. But Columbia isn’t known for embracing experimental music. We’ve been doing this for over a decade. It’s been a slow process of getting people to take chances. That’s why I say it’s not just about experimental music. Some of what we program is very accessible. The Hailu Mergia show, for example — I don’t think of his music as exceptionally experimental. It’s accessible. But bringing an 80-year-old to play an accordion at the Blue Note is, in its way, experimental for Columbia.

That was one of his only shows in the States, right?

Yeah. He’s not playing much now. We’d been trying to get him here for years. Since those reissues started coming out, I was hooked. That show was the feel-good event of the year. The crowd was enthusiastic, the band was happy. Mahi’s Ethiopian restaurant downtown made them a great meal. She was so happy to serve them.

That’s amazing.

I wish I’d taken pictures. But I didn’t want to be an anthropologist.

Let people have their moment.

Exactly. It was really special. Those guys were happy to be here.

To support Dismal Niche with a tax deductible donation during their spring fund raiser, go here.