Mill City is about to provide 100 percent more Taffeta this fall.
Perhaps you’ve read an article or two (or three) suggesting that Lowell’s music scene has entered somewhat of a renaissance, and a new music venue at 122 Western Ave. is about to amp up that forward momentum.
Taffeta, a mid-size music and entertainment space, will open this October inside Western Avenue Studios. Located on the first floor of the mill-building-turned-artist-workspace, the venue plans to welcome fans of music, comedy, and theatre at least two to three times a week. Taffeta technically opened last year as strictly a locale for livestreams, offering bands the opportunity to professionally share and record sets from a fully operational soundstage during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Roughly one year later, Tafetta will open its door for “in real life” performances from both local and touring acts, beginning with Fozzy on October 3. The venue has already established that no genre is off the table; past livestreams include sets from Aversed (“extreme” metal), Choke Up (hardcore/emo), Day Grazer (fuzzy alternative), adlt grrrl (art-rock), and Jetty (R&B/soul), among others.
Taffeta is owned and operated by three different men with various ties to the industry: Sean Gordon promoted shows and managed bands throughout his 20s, while Matt Wishnack and Zach LeWinter are both active drummers. Taffeta has also enlisted Waterfront Concerts — who’s booked everyone from Aerosmith to Phish in New Hampshire and Maine — to help snag national touring acts. While the exact capacity is TBD, the 5,000 square foot space should comfortably fit at least 400 guests.
“It was essentially left empty when we acquired it,” the three co-owners tell Vanyaland via email. Prior to Taffeta’s takeover, this area of Western Avenue Studios was dubbed The Onyx Room, a “rentable black box venue.” The function room shuttered in early 2021, giving Gordon, Wishnack, and LeWinter a blank canvas for their vision. Once completed, the venue will feature a bar, a VIP lounge (which takes up roughly one third of the space), and a green room with a full bathroom and shower. To start, Taffeta will sell canned beer, wine, and seltzers using single-day liquor licenses.
“Designing the room from the ground up, we have built the stage and production room from scratch and [this] can be previewed on our Twitch channel,” they write. “Taffeta is uniquely set up to double as a multi-camera studio for capturing and producing high quality live performances. This means we can broadcast, or stream, live online anything that we have going on in the space if the artist wants that.”
In fact, the owners hope to add a video-on-demand option for ticket purchases, which would allow fans to access Taffeta’s professional recording of the show at any point in the future. This feature would (hopefully) eliminate fans’ impulse to obsessively film shaky video clips from the crowd, and place more focus on the performances themselves. After all, capturing silky smooth audio and video is literally what Taffeta was designed for — and that’s a distinction not many pre-pandemic venues can claim.
“The options for musicians in the greater Boston area is limited and we believe that there is a definite need for what Taffeta has to offer,” the owners conclude. “Having already seen a great amount of local talent come to us to participate in our livestreams, we hope to make Lowell a destination for touring acts and a home for local bands that looks great, sounds great, and keeps them and their fans coming back for more.”
Taffeta is now booking acts through the remainder of 2022; reach out to booking@taffetamusic.com for more details.