About two months ago, the Midwest’s most beloved DIY music festival got into some unexpected and extremely stupid legal trouble. Conor Alan, member of the emo band American Spirits and co-founder of Summit Shack, a live music collective and former house venue, received a cease-and-desist from the good people at AEG Presents, the purveyors of—among many other live events, the Coachella Valley Music and Art Festival. A representative from AEG reportedly told Summit Shack that they’ve taken charity organizations to court over similar copyright violations. In light of this multimillion dollar corporate behemoth threatening the grassroots punk festival with what is perhaps the dumbest lawsuit of all time, Fauxchella became just “Faux.”
Back in 2017, Conor and his friends in Summit Shack decided to start a music festival in the Ohio college town of Bowling Green. The first iteration of their festival was just one day and took place in the then-operational house venue, featuring a slate of mostly-local bands, DJs, and stand-up comedians. They named it Fauxchella—a cheeky reference to both Coachella itself and the season seven episode of Comedy Central’s Workaholics, in which the show’s trio of slackers throw together a fake music festival in their backyard to impress some girls they met at a bar. Though thankfully lacking in injuries and unhinged Third Eye Blind lipsynchs, Summit Shack’s Fauxchella embodied the same scrappy, unpretentious spirit of its TV namesake.
As the festival began to grow in size and popularity, it found its new home in Howard’s Club H, a local watering hole and music venue whose main stage and side stage rooms—connected by a wraparound bar—boast standing room capacities of 250 and 100 people, respectively. To combat the all-too-common music festival dilemma of having to choose between your two favorite artists who happen to be performing simultaneously, the main and side stages alternate in half-hour sets, many of which end with a frontperson yelling at the crowd to go to the other room and see the next band. For two days from noon to midnight, you can expect a stampede of frenzied fans migrating from one side of Howard’s to the other every 30 minutes.
For such a chaotic festival, it’s shockingly well-organized. Alan has been the point person for all things Faux (FKA Fauxchella) since the festival’s inception, but was absent this year, and for good reason—his first child was born the day before Faux VIII. In his stead, he appointed Ellie Hart, Summit Shack collaborator, Howard’s bartender, and musician (Ellie has performed at Faux as both a soloist and as the bassist for Ohio emo band Equipment). After Ellie’s solo set of charming acoustic singer-songwriter tracks on Saturday afternoon, I asked them a bit about their involvement with the festival over the years. They met Conor back in 2018 while he was on tour with American Spirits. Ellie was living in New Jersey at the time and had reached out to him for advice for organizing a music festival in their hometown.
“We instantly connected,” says Ellie. “Two hour phone call, great buds, the kinda thing where you can talk to someone once and be like ‘This is gonna be my friend forever.’” Eventually touring with Conor and getting involved with Summit Shack inspired them to move to Bowling Green. The way Ellie describes their friendship and working relationship with Conor feels emblematic of Faux’s ethos at large, everything is powered by a love of the music and a love of the friends making it happen. With that attitude, everywhere can be your local scene.
“One of the best parts of Fauxchella is that we can be all the way out here in Ohio and shit but all our friends from the East Coast are here too,” says Joe Pelegano, bassist of the Connecticut pop punk band Cinema Stare. “We’re relatively new to Faux—we played Faux VI—and that just showed me how tight the Midwest is, because people were driving like, five hours to be here. You can’t get people to drive 45 minutes in Connecticut!”
Though Faux has consistently had its finger on the pulse when it comes to booking up-and-coming acts in punk, emo, and indie rock, the festival has also collected a loyal slate of fan favorites who keep coming back to play year after year. On Friday night, the main room is packed shoulder-to-shoulder for Equipment—hometown heroes who’ve played every Faux since 2022. Since then, lead singer Nick Zander has moved from Bowling Green to Denver, making Equipment’s Faux sets feel even more like homecoming celebrations. Mainstays of both the Ohio DIY circuit and the Faux lineup, Equipment are an example of one of the most rewarding aspects of returning to the festival: watching a band grow their sound and fanbase, and in doing so, reconnect with an institution that helped them get their start. Since the release of their 2023 album Alt Accounts, they’ve toured with emo fan favorites like Mom Jeans, Origami Angel, and Sweet Pill, and have played The Fest (Faux has all but become a feeder for this Gainesville punk rite of passage).
The mood is similar the following night during a set from Indianapolis emo band Summerbruise—also veterans of Faux lineups past. I was lucky enough to bear witness to a major event in Faux history two years ago: the infamous Summerbruise vs. Carpool Battle Set, which was kind of like the Pacers vs. Knicks game for emo fans. During their Faux VIII set, Summerbruise’s energy remains as explosive as ever, as they debut their latest single “Never Bothered” for an audience so dedicated that plenty of them already know all the words. While introducing Equipment’s new single “Espresso Lemonade,” Nick accidentally slips up by referring to the festival by its forbidden name, before doubling down: “Fuck it, I’ll say Fauxchella! I forgot that lawyer’s name ‘cause he’s a piece of shit!” This kind of thing happened a lot over the weekend. To many—to most, probably—Faux is still Fauxchella. Anyway, what’s AEG gonna do, sue them all?
Other Friday highlights include the Philly screamo outfit Haunt Dog, Nashville’s proggy math rock tricksters Topiary Creatures, and FinalBossFight, a Michigan group whose flavor of emo is as melodic as it is earsplitting. Later in the evening, the surprise guest of Faux VIII’s “secret set” is revealed: Harrison Gordon, an Illinois punk powerhouse whose band seems to be the Gen-Z answer to Death Rosenstock. A set that didn’t even appear on the lineup, Harrison Gordon still manages to pack the side stage room to the brim. While introducing “a song about not having health insurance,” Gordon howls out a mosh call with a purpose: “An injury to one is an injury to all!”
While not an overtly political festival, Faux has the progressive bent of any punk festival worth its salt. Opportunities to donate to mutual aid funds appear at most merch tables, alongside resources like harm reduction kits and pamphlets about dealing with ICE agents or police officers. Throughout the festival, musicians preach to the choir words that, even when said to those who already agree, really can’t be stressed enough: calls to free Palestine from Israeli occupation and genocide, to protect the rights of trans people and immigrants as they’re being stripped away by a fascist goverment, to resist bigotry and oppression wherever it crops up. Momentary havens feel particularly crucial in states like Ohio, where both legislation and rhetoric grow more suppressive by the day.
Jael Holzman—political reporter and frontwoman of Ekko Astral, one of the bands on Faux VIII’s lineup—understands this: “Just now the governor of Ohio is on the precipice of signing into a law a litany of new restrictions on LGBTQ people—restricting their identification and going after the education system to all but eradicate queer existence in this state.” To smaller, non-coastal cities in red states, scenes like the one Summit Shack have helped to cultivate can be a lifeline to queer, trans, and otherwise marginalized music fans who might not have access to that kind of progressive community elsewhere.
Just a few weeks before Fauxchella, Jael and the other members of Ekko Astral, Liam Hughes and Miri Tyler, curated and hosted Liberation Weekend, a DC-based music festival benefitting trans rights nonprofit Gender Liberation Movement. During Ekko Astral’s Faux set on Saturday night, Jael tells the crowd that Faux was instrumental in showing Ekko how to throw their own DIY music festival. “I’d watched [Faux] from afar for years and was marveling specifically at how Summit had built it within a community that otherwise wouldn’t have been the site of a big-ass music festival that sells out,” she tells me. “When we first started looking at Liberation Weekend as even an option, I just thought, ‘Well, if Fauxchella can do it, we can do it.’ That’s been the thing that a lot of DIY festival organizers across the United States have been looking up to.”
In addition to Ekko Astral, the Liberation Weekend-to-Faux VIII pipeline also includes Pretty Bitter, whose hazy dream-pop punk manages to get even the most staunch moshpit purists to actually dance, and Home Is Where, who’ve headlined both festivals in support of their third record, an alt-country ripper called hunting season. Inspired in part by co-songwriters’ Bea MacDonald and Tilley Komorny’s reluctant departure from their home state of Florida in light of increasing anti-trans legislation, watching this band, whose members have been scattered across the country shut down a festival that’s become a cathartic punk oasis, is especially resonant.
Pretty Bitter guitarist Kira Campbell sums up Faux as, “DIY coming together to build the most beautiful festival I’ve ever seen with the most energy I’ve ever seen behind emo and punk music.” Her words stick with me throughout the rest of Saturday, while I’m watching attendees two-step to zany New York punk band ok cuddle, thrash around to the deep-fried shoegaze of Minneapolis four-piece Fend, or snake through the room in a conga line while Oklahoma emo band Red Sun play a raucous, shreddy cover of David Guetta’s “Titanium.” I think about the distances all these bands have traveled—most of them just to play this festival as a one-off—and the distances fans have traveled to be here. For me, it was a 12-hour drive from North Carolina, which, when I’d try to explain why such a long journey to a punk festival in Ohio was 100% worth it, usually got me puzzled looks from friends and family members who’d just heard me clarify, “No, not Coachella.”
Clearly, it’s not just worth it to me. This year’s Faux sold out in just a day, with fans clamoring for resale tickets up until the night before the festival. Faux VIII marks the ending of a chapter in Summit Shack history—it’s the last Faux to take place at Howard’s. The demand is too high and the once-little DIY festival has once again outgrown the confines of its home. I ask Ellie what they see for the future of Faux in its post-Howard’s era. “We kind of ask ourselves that question every year,” they tell me. “I definitely anticipate it staying in Ohio, moving to probably a bigger venue, because we love Howard’s, but there comes a point where you outgrow it. So if we could move to even, like, 500-600 capacity.” There aren’t too many other Bowling Green venues that can accommodate the kinds of crowds that Faux has amassed, so it’s likely future Fauxs will take place in a larger Ohio city like Toledo or Cleveland. Conor has said that he and the Summit Shack crew have approached every installment of the festival as if it’s going to be the last one. Though Faux VIII is the end of an era, in some ways it feels like they’re just getting started.
Grace Robins-Somerville is a writer from Brooklyn, New York, currently based in Wilmington, North Carolina. Her work has appeared in Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Alternative, Merry-Go-Round Magazine, Salvation South, Swim Into The Sound, and her “mostly about music” newsletter Our Band Could Be Your Wife.
