Shining the Spotlight on a Lowell Treasure: Taffeta Venue Shines Like a Diamond
Thirty miles from Boston in Lowell, a new independently owned music venue located at 122 Western Avenue is actively booking events into the Summer. Calendar of upcoming shows and events here: Event Schedule (taffetamusic.com).
Taffeta has been a longtime goal of friends and owners Matt Wishnack, Zach LeWinter, and Sean Gordon. All three have a love of music and various ties to the industry, Gordon promoted shows and managed bands throughout his twenties, while Wishnack and LeWinter are both active drummers.
Taffeta is both a concert venue and entertainment space located on the first floor of Western Avenue Studio, the mill-building-turned-artist-workspace. The venue plans to welcome fans of music, comedy, and theater while showcasing both national and local acts.
The space technically opened in 2021 as a location for livestreams, offering bands the opportunity to professionally share and record sets from a fully operational soundstage in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. At Taffeta, no genre will be off limits. 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 has also enlisted Waterfront Concerts who has booked everyone from Aerosmith to Phish to help bring in national touring acts. “It was essentially an empty space when we acquired it, formally the Onyx Room, a rentable black box venue which closed in early 2021, giving us a blank canvas for our vision” explain Gordon, Wishnack, and LeWinter. They continue, “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, stream, live online anything that we have going on in the space if the artist wants that”.
Gordon, Wishnack, and LeWinter 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” they explain. “The options for musicians in the greater Boston area are limited and we believe that there is a definite need for what Taffeta has to offer. Having already seen a great amount of local talent grace our stage, we hope to make Lowell a destination for touring acts and a home for local bands”.
Taffeta is in the midst of a crowdfunding campaign, hoping to garner the support of the community to raise funds for important improvements to improve the patron experience. Read their story at www.patronicity.com/taffeta
Instagram - @taffetamusic
Facebook - www.facebook.com/taffetamusic
Venue Contact - sean@taffetamusic.com
National Talent Buyer - jason@waterfrontconcerts.com