Local Haunts
NOTE: This is a mix of a show review, musical history, and also a weekend diary. It will be talking about various things and will have various pictures throughout the weekend.
Usually around the holiday I do get pretty nostalgic and tend to think about our family Christmas eve parties that were held by both of my grandmothers. This gave me the initial inspiration for the project. In my own mind at least, Grandma’s Cottage began to pull away from the literal “Grandmother” theme and now explores more general senses of nostalgia. However, pieces of that original theme always remain. For example, the song Distant Engines is inspired by nights I would sleep over at my grandmother’s house. She stayed downstairs, and I slept in a guest room upstairs (my mother’s childhood bedroom) The house was very dark, empty and quiet, and at night I would here the train whistles in the distance. It was always a bit of an eerie feeling but something that always stuck with me.
-L.T (Grandma’s Cottage)
I don’t know if l laughed when seeing the lineup but it certainly was humorous. Hole Dweller, one of the most recognizable names in dungeon synth along with the first performance by comfy synth pioneer Grandmas Cottage was playing a sold out show in New York City. These are the sort of things you joke about when talking to others on forums about internet based micro genres. On my train ride up to New York I saw that Vaelastraz was providing support and laughed even more since I seem to continue to run into her even outside of our shared local area. I think I have seen her at 4-5 dungeon synth related events in 2025 and recently during her year end retrospective saw all of my pictures counting down the year. Its been a time of wonder and strangeness.
I have been coming to NYC for almost 20 years. My brother moved here in 2007 and for a good part of our post college career we would take Greyhounds / Megabuses on Fridays from DC and gather as a big group of friends going to weird bars and restaurants. My brother is a musician and busked in the subways for a decade playing strange art spaces, residencies at upscale bars, and shitty venues with shitty covers in shitty parts of the city. Over the course of time these trips would slow to the point when I had to ask when the last time I came up slowly realizing it had been over 5 years and I might have missed an entire apartment where he lived. I need to remember to get a box of tapes my Mom gave him. These tapes have various recordings of my dad and mom playing piano and singing I wanted to listen to. We both are forgetful often when we see each other.
Comfy synth was a phenomenon which began a few years before the pandemic but exploded during the time when everyone was at home consuming the internet. It was an offshoot of yet another synth genre called dungeon synth which I have talked about more than once on this site. Hole Dweller was not the first idyllic / comfy synth which was produced (Chronicles of Jest’s Yeoman’s Tale was released in 2016) but it is difficult to argue that Flies The Coop in 2019 wasn’t to first to reach a level of popularity which perhaps inspired a new generation of at home synth artists looking to make melodic instrumental music with a nostalgic longing. Comfy synth was novel at the time and even transgressive for its unorthodox embrace of gentle soundscapes in a genre which was known for its dismal atmosphere. If anyone forgot or missed this time, I collected all of the comfy synth which was released in 2020. Hole Dweller along with Grandma’s Cottage were some of the first artists to play in this style and at the time it seemed like a big joke we would all eventually get tired of before going back to wallowing in lofi castles. It is now the end of 2025 at a sold out show in NYC trying to get to the front to take pictures in a room full of people who look like they are simultaneously going to a metal show and the renaissance fair. Some, including the two headliners, are wearing holiday sweaters. It is still remarkable that this collection of artists perhaps exhibit the polar opposite of what people think when they hear the term dungeon synth.
My brother still plays music but as a day job tends bars at various places around the city. I think he said he works at three different bars and doesn’t really like any of them fully. The time before the show I found myself at one of his bars with his other friends who I had never met. I stopped drinking a few years ago during the pandemic but am always fascinated by regulars at bars. I ask him who his regulars are and if anyone travels outside of their neighborhood to drink. For the most part, he tells me, everyone finds a place they are comfortable with that is local and somewhere with the right vibe. He makes me a mocktail he invented and says Gen Z people love mocktails and don’t drink like older generations and also get into less confrontations with other regulars. I often think about where I would go given the right circumstances like living up here and where I would call home. All of our family lives in different cities now and rarely talks to each other outside of polite group texts. We did wish everyone a Merry Christmas on the day of through text. My brother and I have kept the strongest relationship through the years though it’s been so long since I have been here.
TV EYE, the venue, is in a strange place transportationally. Over the course of the weekend my brother and his friends would argue, without resolve, whether or not it is in Queens or Brooklyn being in some hinterland or contested territory. I could have taken the train / bus / holiday rickshaw to get there but even asking those friends at my brother’s bar they gave screwed up faces when asking how to get there. I took a cab to get here and asked my driver to play music he enjoyed for the long trip since it was rush hour. We listened to Punjabi hip hop which felt festive with the snow falling while he explained what the songs meant while showing me the music video from his phone. TV EYE could be easy to miss if not for the hypnotic neon eye outside which looks like the facade of a David Lynch film. The inside ambience was a mix of goth / post punk / weirdo / synth with an aesthetic of gothic reality hardened by harsh punk. The toilets look like year long projects to cover every inch in aggressive stickers that I wonder if they planned for or just abandoned them to bored musicians with time and merch to kill. If I drank and lived in the city, for some reason close to this place, I could see this being my local bar. I would also have places to see dungeon synth and drink mocktails.
I have done design for my brother for the past 30 years drawing his first album cover on a big poster board and getting it shrunk and copied at Staples or Kinkos. I don’t think I expected or wished he would get into this weird style of bedroom ambient I have followed for ten years but for some reason if he did I would have a lot to talk about. He plays an 8 string bass and I don’t think there have been any dungeon synth with 8 string bass yet but stranger things have happened. For as much I have written about this genre I don’t think I talk much about it in person mainly because there would be a lot to frame balanced with an interest in the subject which I assume is always zero. I had to explain to him that Hole Dweller, the headliner to the dungeon synth show, was without a synth on stage (opting for guitar) and lacked the dungeon aesthetic which again was an anomaly in 2019. Also outside of the two openers there was no cloaks or medieval garb to adorn the stage show. Christmas lamps usually are not the sort of thing that is associated with this genre. I don’t think he particularly cares but mentioned how melodic and major key this whole affair was but was most certainly false advertising for a dungeon synth show. My Mom still has the artwork I did for my Brother’s first album along with all of my other free to make artwork I I gifted her for Christmas presents I knew she could never not love.
We are in the green room and the coat check girls are skateboarding down the wooden hallway which leads to the back. There is no one here outside of various people who looked like they belonged to any backstage watching the show from the small side stage. Vaelestraz and I talk about non alcoholic beer and I wonder how much TV EYE charges for Athletic beer. I talk to L.T. about the small explosion of comfy synth during the pandemic and how I have an unproven conspiracy theory that most of it was done by one person under multiple Bandcamps. Whether or not it is true the fact is comfy synth got popular perhaps because of the appearance of multiple people playing in the same genre at the same time. Grandmas Cottage is selling long sleeve shirts with the words “Comfy” and “Synth” on each sleeve and I wonder if it would look cool under my vest. I don’t think anyone here cares anymore about the once divide between comfy synth and proper dungeon synth mainly because we are off the internet and in person where things matter less.
The show ended earlier than I thought it would for being in New York. Though it would be cool to experience the long stretches of strangeness throughout the night in a city, my brother and I are also both silently elated that we can get back to Brooklyn before midnight. We ordered savory crepes which were the best thing I ate all weekend and watched From Dusk Till Dawn remarking how mediocre of a movie it really was. We used to watch a lot of movies when we were growing up going through most of the cool ultra violent films on VHS tapes which defined the indulgent 1990s. At one point Tarantino films were some of my favorites but now I keep tripping over its use of casual slurs and haphazard plot points. I don’t watch TV or movies now and can’t remember the last full film I wanted but it was probably with him when we were back at home for Christmas. It was a pleasant end to the night while I processed the photos from the show. It was snowing fully when we left and my dad gave me a dreadful sense of fear when it comes to the weather. I always worry about being trapped from leaving a place. throughout the weekend I expressed this fear to people but the NYC locals assured me no one gives a fuck about snow.
On the train ride back I talk to Steaming Woodlands, the first opener, over messages. I talk with them about upcoming NYC dungeon synth shows and make plans to come back to photograph more events. I made plans to see my brother again in Spring to come up again and go biking through the city. He will probably come to whatever show is playing and maybe we will bike to whatever out of the way venue it is being held. I think he enjoyed the show or at least the company and I didn’t talk much about dungeon synth over the whole weekend. I completely forgot those fucking tapes and am going to have to come back to get them. Maybe my dream of having a local city with a local haunt will come true, especially since I keep forgetting or subconsciously giving a reason to make plans for next time.
I message Hole Dweller, who i have met only once at NEDS for a brief time but we talk about the show and also the tour that was concluding before going out to London. I ask him about nostalgia and his music. I don’t think I fully express what his music has meant to me over the years giving me some sense of nostalgia for places and times that I never really experienced. His message is short but I feel it in a way sums up my weekend and also the reason for writing this article the way that I did. Thanks to the band’s who got me in to the sold out show. I would love to come back.
For me it means a longing for a past I can never return to. The memories are a place for comfort, but it also comes with a bit of heartbreak. Life moves so fast that it’s hard to take in everything in the moment, so nostalgia must be a way for humans to finally process the beauty of the simple things.
– Hole Dweller
