Chet Chomsky: The underground Queens club where Cameron Winter performed under an alias
Cameron Winter is becoming quite the celebrity.
Any attempt on his behalf to run from this fact is made harder, considering that he’s recognisable in any crowd; at six foot three, with that half-scraggly-half-greasy haircut and that chic eras-bygone aura about his shoulders, there aren’t many places in Queens, New York, that Winter can hide, but he sure can try.
In January 2026, the Geese frontman performed a 40-minute set, top-heavy with unreleased tunes, at TV Eye in Queens, and like all trendy New York spots, the location is multi-purpose, doubling as a bar, cocktail lounge, cinema, dance club, gallery, and eatery.
Because of this, the venue has settled on the term ‘Funhaus’ to describe its purpose, with, at most, a capacity of up to 250, and despite being proto-modern, the place is imbued with a happy sense of history; the bar contains ancient floorboards, which are all that remain from the original 1930s textile factory interior that once occupied the space.
Each weekend boasts a line-up of activities more bombastic than the last. At the time of writing, TV Eye has just announced a Friday night headlined by ‘skull practitioners’ (whatever that means), a Saturday night headlined by the bands Ferment, Dog Breath, No Model, and Arsenik, and a Sunday night headlined by intense, too-cool-for-school garage-rock band Daniel Romano’s Outfit. It’s a lot, and it’s always a lot.
But Winter wasn’t appearing, under an alias, at the location just because he could; on the contrary, the evening was a charity event in aid of Olive Grove Initiative, a mutual aid group supporting families in Gaza, distributing funds made from the night to families in need in the warzone. Though the evening was put on for this incredible cause, the set also took place at an opportune time for the singer; Geese were set to perform their first-ever Saturday Night Live performance that very weekend, so the band was lurking around the cold corners of the city.
But where exactly did the name Chet Chomsky come from?
Like all of Winter’s greatest, albeit nonsensical, lyrical ruminations, it came from the uncharted waters of his imagination. Chet Chomsky, the documentation marketing the night shared, was a “newly discovered southwestern master of song” from Tucson, Arizona, who was worried about New York City’s congestion pricing.
However, the singer-songwriter couldn’t hide behind the Chomsky mask for long, as he evidently had more on his mind than road tax. Every time a new Winter track is unveiled, it feels like the lyricism Gods have opened up their notebooks to find that two pages were stuck together; there, mischievously, was an entire double-paged spread of absolutely golden melodic poetics yet to be used by the human race, and Winter managed to get his hands on them all.
“All I have left, I have all to myself,” he sings on the set opener and unreleased tune, ‘It All Fell in the River’.
Later in the set, he renders the audience totally silent with a version of the also-unreleased track, ‘If You Turn Back Now’, a song that Far Out was also awe-struck by at his much larger, more official, solo show at London’s The Roundhouse. “If you turn back now, I might just watch you go. I might love you again if you leave me alone”, and whatever the form, Chet Chomsky or Cameron Winter, this level of genius is undeniable.
