Kyle Kellams: It’s fair game to talk autumn. We’re going to talk autumn music at the Momentary in Bentonville with Will Eubanks, who is joining us again from the Momentary. Will, how are you doing?
Eubanks: Good. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.
Kellams: All right. So we’re not going to be sticklers and say that fall comes in Sept. 20 or 21 because seasons are a frame of mind, right?
Eubanks: Sure. Yeah, absolutely. I’m going to count it as fall.
Kellams: Okay. Well, let’s talk about the fall season at the Momentary, kind of do indoors and outdoors. Let’s go outdoors first because Live on the Green continues into the next couple of months.
Eubanks: That’s right. This month, we’ve got Pancho Barraza. It’s our first big Latin act that we’ve had out on the green. So we’re really excited about that, getting that community here into the Momentary. After that, we’ve got Japanese Breakfast making a comeback. She was here in 2022, I believe, and they really enjoyed it. They wanted to come back. They love Bentonville and Northwest Arkansas. We’ve got Ziggy Marley coming. We’ve got Blues Traveler with Spin Doctors coming for all the folks that are the ’90s rock guys out there. I’m personally really excited about it. That’s the music I grew up with.
Kellams: Well, I want to go back to the Ziggy Marley show because that also includes Burning Spear. And I think it’s fair to say there are a couple of legends. That’s not to take anything away from any other artists we mentioned, but Ziggy Marley and Burning Spear—that’s a huge show.
Eubanks: Yeah, it’s a huge get for us and it’s a little bit out of our normal lane. But like you said, they’re both such legends. And I think it’s going to reach a new community here. Hopefully it’s really successful.
Kellams: All right. These are all happening Live on the Green. If someone hasn’t been to a show at the Momentary on the Green, what can you tell them about it?
Eubanks: I think the biggest selling point for me has always been it’s a very communal vibe. So if you imagine a Gully Park series, that kind of vibe, but bigger and professional and with those headline acts—that’s the vibe we try to curate. You can bring your own chair. It’s just a very low-key, relaxed evening.
Kellams: There’s also the Roadhouse, which is indoors and a room that can be modified in different ways. Let’s talk about who’s going to be inside this fall.
Eubanks: The Roadhouse is, in my personal opinion, the best room for music anywhere in a 500-mile radius. The sound and lights, the acts we’re able to get—it’s unbelievable. It’s only about 500 capacity, so you get these really awesome intimate shows. We’re going to have folks like Mon Rovîa, who’s an up-and-comer in the Appalachian folk scene. Then we’ve got Unwound. They’re post-hardcore pioneers. I guarantee any band you’ve listened to in that vein post-2000, this band would have been a huge influence. And then we’ve got Deafheaven. They’re also in that hardcore, post-hardcore metal world. You get in trouble with genres around punk and hardcore, but I’ll call them what I call them.
Kellams: Already that has happened inside—that is in our past now, was East Nash Grass with Sons of Otis Malone opening. When you look at this Roadhouse series—so East Nash Grass, great bluegrass pickers. And then you mentioned the folk artist Mon Rovîa. You’ve got Lucius. I know we’re staying away from genres, but they’re kind of what we would call indie rock.
Eubanks: Yeah, indie rock, indie pop, that sort of thing. They do a lot of stuff with Americana artists. They were just at Newport Folk Festival and that kind of stuff.
Kellams: And then Unwound and Deafheaven. I think we’ve talked about this before—I want to meet the person that goes to all of them.
Eubanks: Yeah, I would too, honestly. We really intentionally program a pretty eclectic range of genres. We try to stick to—you know, we talk a lot about whatever the genre is, we want to be kind of one click left on the indie side of things. Do something that otherwise you wouldn’t really see in our area. But we’ve done country, we’ve done folk, we’ve done EDM, we’ve done indie metal. It’s so all over the place, and it’s intentionally so.
Kellams: Will Eubanks is great with the segues here because he mentioned EDM. Let’s talk about Momentous. It’s the two-day EDM festival at the Momentary. What does that look like?
Eubanks: It’s expanded this year. Like you mentioned, it is a two-day festival. Last year we had it in March as a single-day thing, and it was so successful that we’ve expanded it. Essentially it’s a total of five stages activated with all sorts of different forms of EDM and electronic music in general. We tie in performance art, food. This year we’ve got a thing called the Night Market that’s going to be this sort of bizarre take on what you would see in a late-night Asian market. We’ve got an installation coming in called Firebird by a group called Touki Delphine. They basically built a video wall out of recycled tail lights. It’s this visual and audio installation, and there will be a performance around that. It’s super fun. You can walk around the grounds, and any corner you turn, you never know what you’re going to run into.
Kellams: That’s Oct. 10-11. Are all five stages outdoors?
Eubanks: No, they’re going to be all around the property. We’ll have our big stage on the Green activated, Roadhouse and Fermentation Hall, and then we’ll have a couple pop-up stages inside and out.
Kellams: Thank you so much. Always great to talk with you.
Eubanks: Thanks, Kyle. I appreciate it.
Kellams: Will Eubanks is performing arts project manager and administrator at the Momentary in Bentonville. We talked via Zoom earlier this week. Pancho Barraza is the next musical act at the Momentary. That performance is on the Green Sept. 6.
A full schedule for the shows we talked about can be found at the Momentary website. Momentous, the two-day EDM festival, is scheduled for Oct. 10-11, with featured performers including Tycho.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
