Meet the artists at next month's Columbia Experimental Music Festival
Columbia's key music festivals keep finding fresh ways to fulfill their names. The Roots N Blues festival, held earlier this month, connects the dots from its current acts back to the blues — and shows how all music is roots music to someone.
Likewise, the Columbia Experimental Music Festival, with events stretching across the first week of November, acknowledges and honors the inherent risks of making any truly original piece of art. This allows the festival, presented by local arts and music collective Dismal Niche, to program artists across genre: folk, hip-hop, rock, neo-classical and more.
This year's lineup showcases range across its roster — and within each artist's own body of work. Here's a brief look at this year's featured artists.
Godspeed You! Black Emperor
Hails from: Montreal
Style: Often assigned to the genre "post-rock," this pioneering Canadian outfit creates instrumental tracks of great musicality and mood. These songs storm and stir, evolving and shape-shifting over their span, drawing out any number of emotions listeners might need to let loose.
Notable work: The band's 2012 album "'Allelujah! Don't Bend! Ascend!" won the prestigious Polaris Music Prize the following year; in its five-star review of 2000's "Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven," AllMusic deemed the album "a windfall for any fan of ambient pop, orchestral rock, space rock, or simply lush string arrangements who understands how powerful love, melancholy, and frustration can be."
Appears: 8 p.m. Nov. 6 at The Blue Note
Lubomyr Melnyk
Hails from: Ukraine
Style: The pianist-composer performs what he calls "continuous music," in which "lines and individual rhythmic cells ... bubble, undulate and gradually expand into vast, interlinked frameworks," his Erased Tapes label notes. Melnyk's music weaves together a minimalist approach, the influence of Ukrainian folk music and other traditions from around the world, the label adds.
Notable work: Both recent and significant, the 2018 album "Fallen Trees" reflects his abiding interest in nature, the title coming from an observation made while passing a forest by train, Erased Tapes said.
"They were glorious," he told the label. "Even though they’d been killed, they weren’t dead. There was something sorrowful there, but also hopeful."
Appears: 7 p.m. Nov. 5 at Missouri United Methodist Church
RAP Ferreira
Hails from: Nashville by way of the Midwest
Style: Performing under a variety of names (most notable, his former Milo moniker) and in eclectic contexts, Ferreira thoughtfully weds jazz flourishes and minimalist leanings into his hip-hop aesthetic. "He’s been a rigorous technician since his earliest releases, but as Ferreira he’s more free spirit than showboat," Pitchfork's Stephen Kearse wrote in 2020.
Notable work: In addition to recordings under his name(s), Ferreira has collaborated with Open Mike Eagle, Armand Hammer, Anderson .Paak and more. Recording as Milo, his 2017 record "who told you to think??!!?!?!?!" made Pitchfork's best hip-hop list that year.
"The album is a seemingly endless maze of digressions, asides, and musings, philosophical in nature yet craft-like in practice. But don’t be fooled: Every sentence is purposeful; no word is out of place," the magazine noted.
Appears: 8 p.m. Nov. 4 at Rose Music Hall
Marisa Anderson
Hails from: Portland, Oregon
Style: Quietly soulful and always growing toward a source of musical light, the guitarist-composer's work finds the perfect plot of ground between minimalist and cinematic approaches. With time spent in country, jazz and even circus ensembles, Anderson's music takes these layers of experience and focuses them into a narrative instrumental sound.
Notable work: Anderson has recorded with the likes of William Tyler and Jim White; her latest, this year's "Still, Here," sounds out a beautiful push-and-pull.
Appears: 2 p.m. Nov. 6 at Columbia Public Library; with North Carolina duo MANAS in support of Godspeed You! Black Emperor later that night at The Blue Note
Jeremiah Chiu and Marta Sofia Honer
Hails from: Los Angeles by way of Chicago
Style: Chiu, a multi-instrumentalist who specializes in keyboards and synthesizers, and violinist/violist Honer each own a wide range of work; they pool their talents in service of music that travels across the borders of ambient, folk and neo-classical.
Notable work: This year's "Recordings from the Åland Islands" springs from a trip the duo took to islands between Sweden and Finland. Fascinated by the particular beauties of light and dark — "The sun doesn’t set in the summer (and barely rises in the winter)," the album's Bandcamp page notes — as well as flora and fauna, Chiu and Horner composed and recorded their response. The resulting album shimmers, existing as a deeply naturalistic document and musical portrait of tranquility.
Appears: 7 p.m. Nov. 5 at Missouri United Methodist Church
H31R
Hails from: Brooklyn, New York
Style: The East Coast duo of Maassai and Jwords create a burrowing form of hip-hop; the pair are ever-tunneling, tunneling into a deep, dark sound — and into Maassai's lyrics, which touch several circles of relationship and connection. Jwords' "beats are like a fusion of dirty New York hip-hop, house, and New Jersey club music; they aren’t the easiest instrumentals to rap over, but Maassai is not intimidated," Pitchfork's Alphonse Pierre wrote in 2020.
Notable work: The pair's 2020 offering "ve·loc·i·ty" both establishes a distinct style and keeps listeners on their toes, ready to respond to Maassai's every turn-of-phrase and Jwords' every turn-of-the-dial.
Appears: 8 p.m. Nov. 4 at Rose Music Hall
Other festival events:
Nov. 2: Darkroom Records high school band showcase with Drona and Estrella 7 p.m. at Cafe Berlin
Nov. 3: An experimental short films program will screen 8:30 p.m. at Ragtag Cinema, sandwiched by performances from Oxherding and Haii Usagi
Nov. 4: Festival afterparty with 18andCounting at Rose Music Hall
Nov. 5: "Black Artists Group: Creation Equals Movement" documentary screening 3 p.m. at Fretboard Coffee; and a festival afterparty with Tri-County Liquidators, Blights and Rifle Cult at PDM.
For a full schedule, a range of ticket options and more, visit https://cargocollective.com/dismalniche/2022-CEMF.
This article originally appeared on Columbia Daily Tribune: Columbia Experimental Music Festival honors risk, delivers reward
