The Garment District’s new video for “Cooling Station” is a sonic and visual postcard from one of Las Vegas’s last true relics: Circus Circus.
More than just a backdrop, the fading family casino becomes a living character in the piece, its neon history flickering in sync with the instrumental’s shifting textures. The project functions as both a love letter and an elegy, a meditation on the strange, fragile magic of a space that might soon be lost to redevelopment.
Circus Circus, opened in 1968, still holds traces of its original carnival promise: the mezzanine Carnival Midway, the trapeze shows, the Adventuredome’s surreal pink sprawl. The video lingers on details that most visitors miss: ornate railings, archaic typefaces, patterned carpets steeped in the memory of cigarette smoke, even hot-pink trash cans that proudly bear the casino’s double-stacked name.
These fragments of design are architectural hallucinations that echo forgotten stories, from hidden Hippodromes once hosting burlesque revues to boxing matches that were walled off and rediscovered decades later.
Visually, the collaboration between filmmaker Johnny Arlett and Croatian painter Mislav Lešić (who sent his own footage from his first U.S. visit, serendipitously spent at Circus Circus) gives the piece an uncanny double vision. Jennifer Baron of The Garment District took almost all of the footage for the video herself, then Johnny edited and worked his magic. Lešić contributed a few video snippets.
Arlett’s editing leans into abstraction, layering static photography, drifting camera pans, and quick cuts into something that feels like memory dissolving. Paired with The Garment District’s “Cooling Station,” a slow-burning instrumental that swells and recedes like conditioned air in a vast casino atrium, the video moves fluidly between nostalgia, architecture, and dream-state.
The music hums with atmosphere: airy synth passages and layered arrangements that give shape to rooms filled with both wonder and entropy. It’s the architecture translated into sound, offering portals to a dimension where the psychology of place and the abstraction of music blur into one.
Arlett, best known for his sensory-charged work across video, film, and design (and as bassist/vocalist for noise-rock trio Microwaves), brings his signature intensity here. His editing style, rapid but meditative, chaotic yet controlled, mirrors the instrumental’s abstractions, pushing imagination beyond familiar limits.
Together, the result is a documentary and a daydream, a collaboration that captures the spirit of Circus Circus in its twilight years, while transforming “Cooling Station” into an audiovisual tribute for a building still alive, but already half a ghost.
(Band photos by Sadie Shoaf).
Enjoy the video, and catch The Garment District on tour this fall …
THE GARMENT DISTRICT: Autumn Almanac Fall 2025 Shows:
https://linktr.ee/TheGarmentDistrict
Friday, October 3, 2025
The Monongahela Pop Festival
At The Government Center
Tickets (all ages)
https://www.facebook.com/events/838360632482284
Saturday, October 18, 2025
The Windy Pop Weekender in Chicago
With Idle Ray, Julia Steiner (of Ratboys), Tambourina, The Feeders, Modern Cults, Holy Pinto, Humdrum and more
At Cole’s in Logan Square
https://www.windypopweekender.com/
Saturday, November 8, 2025
The Garment District // Giant Day // Chariot Fade // DJ Joan of Arc
Brillbox
https://www.brilloboxpgh.com/
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