RealFest will come to Dunn Meadow Saturday to bring musicians and music lovers together. The festival features artists of varying genres to try and cater to all attendees.
This year's list of performers includes a mix of local talent and artists from other cities like Fraxiom from Chicago, Carriers from Cincinnati and Jake Sargent from Los Angeles. The festival will feature an assortment of genres for attendees to enjoy, a goal that IU alumnus and festival founder Joey Miller expressed placing a lot of importance on when hosting the event.
“Rarely would you ever see a bill with, like, Fraxiom and Carriers on the same lineup, they’re two completely different acts but they’re really cool,” Miller said.
Fraxiom plays a mixture of rap, EDM and hyperpop, while Sargent mainly performs folk music. The rest of the lineup includes La Salsoteca, The Raspberry Jams, Pluto’s Basement, Jack Daye, Obi, Xylocept and Ensifera which all vary in their styles of music.
Miller said he wants the festival to bring people together and is bringing in a variety of musicians to achieve this.
“I think the main goal of this event is to just bring people together, especially people and mainly artists who wouldn’t normally cross paths,” Miller said.
RealFest has stayed mostly the same in its six years of existence, mainly growing in attendance. Miller said this year they also had a larger budget, which is a big change from the first festival’s nonexistent budget.
The festival started in 2021, the year Miller graduated from IU’s Jacobs School of Music in their audio engineering and sound production program. The idea of the festival first came to him while he was working at Mother Bear’s Pizza West bussing tables and washing dishes during his final semester.
“I remember standing there looking at all the dishes and being like, okay, I can plan this. Like, this is becoming an attainable idea for myself,” Miller said.
He said he’d had the idea of doing a festival like WIUX’s Culture Shock, another outdoor music festival, for a while. Since he had worked at Culture Shock and other similar festivals before, he thought that he could do it himself.
Despite having basically no budget in the first year, they were still able to pull it off. Miller said the musicians played for free and his crew volunteered to work without pay. Given the festival’s growth, he can now pay both.
“It’s still a pretty small-budget event, and we are obviously trying to work slowly but surely to make it bigger,” Miller said.
Miller said he expects this year to have the largest crowd; he hopes it will only continue to grow from here.
Miller said he has toyed with the idea of doing it during the school year, but ultimately settled on keeping it in the summer. His love for the summertime and wanting to give those staying in Bloomington over the summer something to enjoy have become his reasons for continuing the event’s summer schedule.
“Anybody that’s spent a summer in Bloomington outside of the school year knows how wonderful it is, and I want this to be something that can feed that enjoyment for those people,” Miller said.
As a student, Miller spent two of his summers in Bloomington, one of them being the summer he started RealFest in 2021 before moving to LA that September to pursue audio engineering projects. He said continuing RealFest has become the perfect opportunity to come back in the summer and hang out in Bloomington while visiting family.
The sixth annual summer music festival RealFest will take place from 1 to 10 p.m. this Saturday at Dunn Meadow. Admission is free for attendees.
