Think Outside the Club
For years, if you wanted to see Miami band Gold Dust Lounge play a show, you’d be better off avoiding typical rock haunts like Tobacco Road or Churchill’s. Instead, this trio has found itself providing esoteric instrumental color to nontraditional venues, including residences at the Standard Hotel and Wynwood Art Walk, Art Basel, the Hukilau festival of Polynesian culture and, outside of our region, the Corning Museum of Glass in Upstate New York.
“When I put the Gold Dust Lounge together, I wanted to incorporate the environment as an element that would influence the performance,” recalls founder and guitarist Russell Mofsky, who has been digitally releasing music as Gold Dust Lounge since 2007. “I wanted to play atypical places where you might not expect to see or hear live music. I came at it from a different angle: Instead of being concerned whether a club has a good walk-in crowd, I looked for places where people were naturally gathering.”
So instead of playing cramped stages for sweaty throngs – which Mofsky was no doubt accustomed to in his old band, legendary SoFla punk group Quit – he plays spacious hotels and galleries, where wine-sipping hipsters and tourists toe-tap to a sound so idiosyncratic that it would seem otherworldly in any space. Combining acid surf, spy-fi, and what has been called “soundtracks to imaginary films,” Gold Dust Lounge is retro kitsch with a dynamic, classically trained musical pedigree.
Early GDL tracks like “Memorial Day,” which sounds like the sort of quietly spacey, meandering ambience Yo La Tengo released on The Sounds of the Sounds of Silence, gave way, in 2012, to the groovier and stranger Wynwood Bootleg, a collection of twangy lullabies for lonely cowhands, vintage surf music circa 1963, and a few examples of what Esquivel might call space-age bachelor pad music.
Mofsky’s more recent material stretches his band’s generic footprint even wider, incorporating more jazz, classic country and afrobeat, while creating plenty of expansive sonic adventures in which to invent your own narratives. Members of Suenalo and Femi Kuti’s Positive Force Band even showed up for a couple of studio recordings for GDL’s forthcoming LP, Lost Sunset, its first physical release. It has been funded largely by a $16,000 Kickstarter campaign.
“Roughly 75 percent of the pledges came from people I don’t know, many of who wrote to share their enthusiasm and passion for our music,” Mofsky says. “It’s incredibly gratifying to know that our music has reach and really matters to our listeners.”
We’ll have to wait until at least January to buy the record, but fans can hear some of these songs live, as Gold Dust Lounge is just embarking on a new frontier: Palm Beach County. The band plays with SWEET BRONCO at The Bamboo Room, 25 South J Street, Lake Worth, at 9pm Nov9.
Tickets are $7 in advance or $10 the day of the show. Call 561-585-2583.
RSVP for the Bamboo Room show
GDL also play Dada on Saturday, November 30 | RSVP
~John Thomason
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