Sounds of Summer
Southeast Ohio jams out at the annual Nelsonville Music Festival.
Story by McKenna Christy
Photos by Scotty Hall
Design by Ally Parker
One of the bands in Stuart’s Oprea Houses’ Afterschool Music Program rocks the stage at the Nelsonville Music Festival. Photo by Scotty Hall for Nelsonville Music Festival.
Music festivals across the country differ in their size, performers, popularity, ticket prices, location and other distinctions. Some may dream of buying tickets to Lollapalooza in Chicago and Coachella in California, but people in Southeast Ohio and beyond look forward to attending the Nelsonville Music Festival (NMF) every year.
Located at the Snow Fork Event Center at 5685 Happy Hollow Road in Nelsonville, NMF has emulated that street name since July 23, 2005, when the festival was first held in downtown Nelsonville Historic Arts District. There were 750 people who made up the crowd of the first event and six bands performed. This past summer, more than 3,000 weekend passes were issued for people attending NMF, 700 single-day passes were purchased and 54 bands and musicians performed.
The festival, since its founding, has served as a fundraiser for Stuart’s Opera House, a non-profit historic theater and performing arts center in Nelsonville. Stuart’s Opera House first opened in 1879, and, according to NMF’s website, hosts more than 75 events every year. Not only does NMF happen to be set in Southeast Ohio, but the presence of performers and vendors based in the area is prioritized.
“NMF creates a much more intimate experience than most other major music festivals and we really focus on ties to our community,” says Mackenzie Kucharsky, NMF’s marketing director, in an email.
Passion Works Studios, based in Athens, creates all of the festival’s decor, and many local and Ohio-based artists perform. The festival is even free to attend for Nelsonville and Buchtel residents.
Festival workers standing behind artwork made by Passion Works Studios for the Nelsonville Music Festival. Photo by Scotty Hall for Nelsonville Music Festival.
While more well-known artists and bands such as Killer Mike and Thee Sacred Souls performed at the festival this past summer, up-and-coming artists were present as well, including John Vincent III and Kara Jackson. Each year, NMF also welcomes bands from Stuart’s Opera House’s Afterschool Music Program (AMP). Young people from ages 11 to 21 who participate in the AMP learn how to play different instruments, form bands and write songs. Stuart’s Opera House’s Arts Education department is tuition-free, and the festival’s fundraising efforts go toward supporting the cause.
Adam Remnant is the assistant director of arts education at Stuart’s Opera House and uses his passion for music to help young people find their own sound and learn how to make music. Remnant says Tim Peacock, the artistic director of Stuart’s Opera House, asked him to teach the program when it was fairly new.
“There were like maybe six or seven students, and [we] just got them playing together as a band,” Remnant says. “At the end of the school year, they performed at the Nelsonville Music Festival, and that was almost 11 years ago.”
Throughout the program’s 2024 season, from September to May, Remnant says nearly 50 students participated, and at NMF this year, nine AMP bands rocked out in front of festival crowds, performing both originals and covers. The students develop their own bands, with some assistance from Remnant, and come up with awesome and creative band names and songs. The bands that performed at NMF this past summer were, Think Unconscious, Ivy Pierce, End Credits, Exit 191, Ghost Outlet, Left Behind, Hidden Grove, Sub-Zero and Sage Blue. It would not be surprising if people hear those band names more commonly in the future, as they successfully jammed out at NMF.
“All the hard work sort of culminates in that moment and you get to see them shine,” Remnant says. “You get to see them perform in front of an audience. ... A lot of them are nervous to get on stage, and then they get up there and do it. You see them prove something to themselves.”
Kucharksy says watching the AMP is one of the most rewarding moments of putting the festival together. The benefits of the opportunity are also evident.
“By featuring Stuart’s Opera House Afterschool Music Program bands alongside national acts, the festival provides valuable experience for these emerging artists while inspiring the next generation of musicians,” Kucharsky says.
Some students return to the program more than once and similarly, some bands have returned to NMF throughout the years. For 14 years, the band Weedghost, consisting of members Andrew Lampela and Kris Poland, have taken their music to the stages of NMF. Outside of NMF, people can find Weedghost and their music on bandcamp.com. According to NMF’s website, Weedghost combines “acoustic instrumentation with layers of electronic noise to channel the droning gospel from the depths of the hills themselves.” The Southeast Ohio hills to be more exact. “Both of us think it’s one of the best weekends of the year,” Lampela says.
Andrew Lampela at the Nelsonville Music Festival. Photo by Scotty Hall for Nelsonville Music Festival.
For Lampela, one of the standout parts of NMF is the people who attend. Lampela explains how there is a community of people who come from around town or others who he just has not seen in a while who make the experience special.
Although the festival has been a consistent regional summer event, “it’s never lost its charm,” Lampela says. Part of NMF’s charm is its ability to develop over the years and focus on more untraditional festival performers. Kojun Hayes, a certified sound healer and Reiki practitioner, provided his service for the second year in a row at NMF this year. Hayes uses “Quartz Crystal Singing Bowls, gongs, Himalayan metal bowls, and other sacred instruments,” according to NMF’s website, to perform sound baths.
“When I begin to facilitate a sound journey with sound meditation, I say, I’m going to create a space that is full of sound,” Hayes says. “And within this space, you will hopefully feel comfortable enough or safe enough or secure enough that you can then do what you need to do within yourself. You can heal yourself or you can just relax.”
The first time Hayes performed a sound bath at NMF, he says it was almost 2 a.m. when he was able to begin because a band had to finish their encore. It did not matter that the sound bath began so early in the morning because the sounds Hayes made from the bowls filled the quiet air and made the environment, with all of its green and surrounding hills, even more peaceful.
This past summer at the festival, Hayes performed a sound bath in the morning following a yoga session. He says the yoga had already made people more relaxed, and his sound bath gently pushed people into more of a meditative state.
“Every time I give a sound bath, at least one person is touched in some way that is really beautiful and healing and just wonderful,” Hayes says.
Unless a music festival is exclusively dedicated to softer- sounding music, many would not assume a general music festival would arrange for its attendees to meditate and feel relaxed. However, “NMF has never been genre specific as we believe the diversity represents the essence of NMF,” Kucharsky says in an email. The diversity of music and events at NMF are matched by the diversity of festival-goers as well.
As residents of Nelsonville and nearby cities and counties attend the festival, so do Ohio University students. Audrianna Wilde graduated twice from OU, first with a bachelor’s degree in journalism in 2023 and then a master’s in public administration in 2024.
Wilde was NMF’s storytelling intern this year and had a full circle moment from when she first attended the festival as a volunteer in 2021, helping direct cars in the festival’s parking lot. After her parking lot duties, Wilde went to one of the festival’s late-night sets.
“I came back every single night [and] had a blast,” Wilde says. “And then the next year, I was like, I have to go back.”
NMF was Wilde’s first introduction to the Athens community outside of OU. The festival made her confident the next four years of being an undergraduate student would work out just fine after meeting all of the nice people who live in the area. As a graduate student, Wilde became the storytelling intern and took photos and videos of the 2024 NMF to be used in the coming year before the 2025 festival.
In capturing all the different aspects of the festival, Wilde also captured NMF’s essences. “You run into the same people throughout the entire weekend,” Wilde says. “I have red hair, so it’s pretty easy for people to recognize me, but even I was walking around, and I was like, ‘Oh, you were at this last night, I got a video of you grooving.’”
NMF is a smaller festival, Wilde says people get to know each other more frequently and people are there to appreciate the music in all it has to offer. When Wilde was taking photos in the “photo pit” alongside other photographers who were all facing their cameras toward the stage, she decided to turn to face the crowd. She was surprised to see a lack of phones being held up to record the performers.
“Everyone is locked into the music,” says Wilde. “Even if they’re not singing word-for-word, you could just see it on their face, like they are in the moment, which I found really fascinating and very different.”
It takes all year to plan each festival, Kucharsky says in an email, and the outcome makes all the work rewarding. The dates of the 19th annual NMF, set to take place in the summer of 2025, have already been announced for June 20 to June 22 when local and national musicians will take to the stages again, most likely with another engaged audience.
“This internship was the golden opportunity for me to show off the community that I have so dearly loved for all of my undergrad and graduate experience in Athens,” says Wilde. “I feel like [NMF] really shows off what our community has to offer: all the music, all the art and the kindness of people all in one place.”
Photos used in this article were provided by Scotty Hall, a local concert photographer. You can support him on Instagram (@stealyoursoulphotography) and purchase his prints on Etsy under the shop name “ByScottyHall.”