A New York hedge fund manager linked to the SFX bankruptcy has been quietly co-managing Avant Gardner and the temporarily closed Brooklyn Mirage nightclub since late last year and leading unsuccessful efforts trying to get it reopened, Billboard has learned.
Andrew Axelrod’s Axar Capital has been a secured creditor of Avant Gardner — the Brooklyn nightclub company that books and manages the Brooklyn Mirage, Kings Hall and the Great Hall — since late 2023, sources close to the company have confirmed.
A year prior, former Avant Gardner CEO Billy Bildstein had negotiated the purchase of the Electric Zoo festival from Axelrod, whose Axar Capital was the senior creditor to media mogul Bob Sillerman’s one-time EDM conglomerate SFX — of which Electric Zoo’s parent company, Made Events, was a part. When SFX went bankrupt in 2015, Axar Capital led a takeover of the company, rebranding it LiveStyle and hiring music executive Randy Phillips to lead a selloff of its assets, which included U.S. promoters like Disco Donnie Presents and Life in Color; Europe’s ID&T, the Dutch promoter behind Tomorrowland; and EDM tech startups like Denver-based electronic music platform Beatport. The last asset to sell, in 2022, was Made Events. Axelrod wanted $15 million for the company and structured the deal so that Avant Gardner could pay Axar Capital using the proceeds from the Electric Zoo festival.
Avant Gardner successfully ran the Electric Zoo festival in 2022 but was sidelined by multiple fiascos the following year including permit denials, gate crashers, the cancellation of the festival’s opening day and accusations of overselling the closing day by 7,000 fans. Due to the disastrous 2023 run, Avant Gardner has faced multiple lawsuits from both fans and unpaid vendors and was condemned by a one-time ally, New York Mayor Eric Adams, who had previously supported the popular Brooklyn Mirage and sided with Bildstein during his high-profile battle with the State Liquor Authority.
Sources tell Billboard that the demise of the festival, and Avant Gardner’s inability to pay Axar the reported $15 million price tag for Electric Zoo, are what led to Axar becoming a senior creditor to Avant Gardner. Terms of the Electric Zoo sale are not public, but a previous agreement between Axar and publicly traded streaming service LiveOne, which purchased Chicago’s Spring Awakening festival — another SFX asset — shows how Axelrod liked to structure some of those deals.
In that agreement, Axelrod sold Spring Awakening to LiveOne for $2.5 million in convertible loans that Axelrod could turn into equity. The deal allowed LiveOne to take over the festival immediately and pay Axelrod back over two years. There was even an option for Axelrod to accept LiveOne stock instead of cash if shares of the company hit certain price targets, but they never did. A month after the deal closed, COVID-19 hit, and Spring Awakening 2020 was canceled. After LiveOne lost $3.5 million on the 2021 event, Axelrod agreed to accept $2.4 million worth of LiveOne stock. But five months later, the value of LiveOne’s stock had fallen 70%, dropping the value of Axelrod’s LiveOne shares to approximately $700,000.
Avant Gardner is a private company, so it’s unclear how the agreement with Axar was structured. Sources tell Billboard that Axelrod made additional investments into the Brooklyn Mirage, which recently underwent extensive renovations and is now attempting to navigate New York’s Department of Buildings to secure a permit to open.
On May 22, Avant Gardner parted ways with Josh Wyatt, a hospitality executive Axelrod had hired to run the company and guide it through renovations that saw the club close for construction. The Brooklyn Mirage was supposed to open May 1 with a concert by Sara Landry, but building inspectors declined to grant the facility a permit to open. A month and a half later, the club has been forced to cancel and relocate more than a dozen shows as its permit problems persist.
Gary Richards, a promoter, touring artist and former CEO of Livestyle for Axar Capital, is now running Avant Gardner and managing day-to-day operations. Billboard reached out to Richards and Axar but was told that neither planned to comment for this story.
