Photograph courtesy Arcade Music Fest
Covington’s historic Arcade Tunnel will be the anchor for a new music festival coming to Greater Cincinnati this weekend. The Arcade Music Festival, a two-day multi-genre event, makes its debut on August 8 and 9, featuring more than 80 artists across eight different Covington venues.
Performers such as Coastal Club, Mosant, Departure Lounge, Black Signal, and more will take the stage at various locations along Pike Street and Madison Avenue. The festival will also treat attendees to more than 30 arts and crafts, clothing, and photography vendors, as well as food trucks and a visual art showcase.
The fest comes on the tail end of a musical summer in the region. The Cincinnati Music Festival celebrated R&B, hip-hop, funk, and soul at Paycor Stadium in July, including performances from LL COOL J and Earth, Wine, & Fire. Other grassroots events, such as the On Point Music Festival at Sawyer Point and touring festivals including Newport’s Summer School Festival have all made their mark on either side of the Ohio River by showcasing lesser-known talent.
Arcade will have to compete with the Voices of America Country Music Fest taking place the same weekend from August 7 to 10, featuring stars like Carrie Underwood, Shaboozey, and Carly Pearce. Nonetheless, Arcade co-founder Jared Metz believes his event will add something different to the mix.
“The initial mission was to bring back the communal aspect of Cincinnati’s music scene, especially with the Midpoint and Bunbury [music festivals] disappearing within the last couple of years,” says Metz, who has been active in the area’s music scene for years as a member of several different bands. “I wanted something similar to Midpoint, where people are bar crawling and they’re just randomly finding new music for cheap, finding music with their friends in different areas of the city.”
Photograph courtesy Arcade Music Fest
The idea for Arcade had humble beginnings. “We were only planning on having a couple small stages,” says Emma Ranney, another active member of greater Cincinnati’s music community, who co-founded the event with Metz. The two met while simultaneously envisioning a musical event in the Pike Street tunnel.
“I was putting together some of the branding earlier this year when I met [Ranney],” says Metz. “I showed her what I was working on, and then the very next day we were essentially business partners.”
Ranney believed that the tunnel, which was rarely utilized at the time, would be difficult to nail down as a venue, but the process ended up being simpler than expected. The rest of the festival’s moving parts began to fell into place afterwards, including the creation of a stage at Ripple Wine Bar (conceptualized after a conversation between Ranney and longtime friend and bar owner Matt Haws), and the sponsorship support of tequila brand Tierra y Libertad. “We just had a ton of support from the community. It became so much easier from the moment we had even just one or two people backing us; we went from zero to nine sponsors in a matter of two months, which allowed us to start investing more into art and marketing.”
The eight venues that will be hosting the Arcade Music Fest (Arcade Tunnel, Revival Vintage Bottle Shop, Second Story, West Sixth Brewery, Madison Live, Galaxie, Olde Town Tavern, and Pike Street Stage) all have their own distinctive themes, according to Metz. “Revival Vintage Spirits, which [Ranney] is the GM of, sells all sorts of vintage liquor, so it was obvious to me when we were booking bands to have a sort of low-key whiskey sipping event there, with American folk music. But Second Story, for instance, which is this quaint cocktail bar, will be more pop-centric, indie-centric.”
Metz says that the festival’s main stage at the tunnel will feature “powerhouse musicians across the board.” The headliners include guitar-driven indie pop band Coastal Club, which has more than 100,000 monthly listeners on Spotify; Cincinnati-based synth metal duo Black Signal, which claims its music “challenges humans for control of Planet Earth”; Midwestern power pop band Mosant, which has dazzled audiences with its retro rock sound and which released its debut album last year; and Departure Lounge, an EDM collective who Jared Metz said came on high recommendation from Ranney. “I’m not super in touch with the local EDM scene but Emma was very adamant. She was like, ‘we’re getting these guys. They’re amazing.’”
According to Metz, Arcade will be just as eclectic from a non-musical standpoint. As well as plentiful vendors and food trucks, the festival will play host to a miasma of futuristic artistic displays. “We booked Forealism, this father-son EDM duo who wear these sequined monster costumes. They perform on a 360-degree stage with all these lights, and they’re doing a two-and-a-half hour set on the street towards the end of the block.”
And Metz and Ranney say that this will not be the only electronic attraction at hand. Local fiber artist Dan Shields will have his own custom installation within the main Pike Tunnel, and Metz adds that Kemper Sauce Studios will provide light-up video game tables.
The Arcade Music Festival will take place Covington on Pike Street and Madison Avenue on August 8-9, with music starting at 6 p.m. on each day. Six of eight stages are free; entry to the Madison Theater and Main Tunnel Stage are $25 for one night, and $45 for two nights. You can buy tickets here.
Image courtesy Arcade Music Fest
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