South Florida bands have endured a year of almost no live performances. We caught up with five of the region’s top recording artists, from up-and-comers to linchpins of the scene, to see how they’re surviving—and thriving—amid a tumultuous landscape.
LOUNGE ACT
Guitarist and composer Russell Mofsky’s formal training began at age 11, but even before that, he was making music—or something akin to it—in ways that still resonate. “As a kid there was a piano in the house, and I used to bang away at it, not knowing what I was doing,” he says. “I would step on the sustain pedal, and it sounded like I was in a cave, and when I hit the low notes, it sounded like thunder. It was a sort of primal, formal relationship with making sound.”
Since 2010, Miami’s Mofsky has recorded under the moniker Gold Dust Lounge, an instrumental collective with a rotating cast of players and a peripatetic approach to genre. Like his earliest experiments in sound, Gold Dust Lounge’s music is prized for its evocative ambience, and the memories, textures and places it suggests.
Inspired by primitive surf rock, tiki music and vintage cinema, Mofsky has produced four albums of unclassifiable gems, ranging from the immersive Polynesian shimmer of “Lost Sunset” to the nocturnal drone of “No Doze” and the gutter blues of “Barfly.” The sleeve of its 2014 breakthrough LP Lost Sunset depicts an Old West gunslinger—carrying a guitar instead of a pistol—confronting a four-eyed alien on a red planet. It’s no wonder Mofsky coined the term “soundtracks for imaginary films” to describe his project.
For Mofsky, the road to Gold Dust Lounge was as winding as his repertory. In 1988, while in high school, he co-founded Quit, a Kendall punk band that would influence a generation of followers. But Mofsky, who had begun studying music at the University of Miami, left the group after two years to dive deeply into jazz.
“I was meeting other kids at UM, in the jazz program, and they were showing me things,” he recalls. “I was always really driven to learn, and to be able to play what I heard in my mind’s ear.” Mofsky describes his 20s as “like I went to seminary. I was hyper-focused, I had no social life, and I was determined to make the best use of the time and really practice. … Andre, the drummer from Quit, says I went on a 10-year jazz odyssey.”
The improvisatory spirit of jazz would inform Gold Dust Lounge years later. But the roots of GDL really germinated in Boston, when Mofsky attended graduate school at the New England Conservatory of Music. Frequenting the city’s vibrant live music scene, he would hear sounds outside the commercial rock and jazz paradigms—like the surf group the Fathoms, the rockabilly trio the Crank-Tones and the western swing band the Spurs. “I thought, I relate to this more than jazz. … It was something you could move to.”
Mofsky wove these musical threads, and others, into Gold Dust Lounge, founded after he moved back to Miami around 2007, and he soon cultivated an unorthodox touring schedule. While most local bands played late-night gigs in clubs, Mofsky, who was raising an infant, sought out opportunities to “maintain dad hours.”
Gold Dust Lounge became the resident band at the Harold Golen Gallery in Wynwood, playing at the Second Saturday Art Walks from 7 to 10. Eventually, GDL became the house band at the idyllic Standard Hotel on Miami Beach.
These days, though Mofsky expects to release more GDL material post-COVID, Gold Dust Lounge concerts are less frequent. The composer, who recently turned 50, lost his mother to lung cancer following the release of Lost Sunset, an event that changed him.
“You lose a parent, and it reshapes your world,” he says. “You’re not truly an adult until you’re the adult. So it wasn’t anybody’s fault, but it changed what I wanted. I wanted to be with my family, and I wanted to keep making music on my terms. That’s really what I continue to do now.”
Find music from Gold Dust Lounge at soundcloud.com/golddustlounge or on your streaming service of choice.
This story is from the May/June 2021 issue of Boca magazine. For more content like this, subscribe to the magazine.
