Hamden | Music | Arts, Culture & Community
Austin Traver in The Shop's recording studio. Photos Kapp Singer.
The Brooklyn-based emo band Branching Out assembled around a microphone in a small recording studio in an industrial building off of State Street. Upon receiving a thumbs up from Pasquale Liuzzi and Austin Traver in the recording booth across the hallway, band members screamed “I’m just not over you” again and again, laying down loud embellishments over the chorus of a new track.
The mid-January recording session offered a glimpse into a new phase of life for The Shop. The vibrant but short-lived DIY music venue in Hamden stopped hosting shows in November 2023, but has found a new life as a recording studio.
“thanks for showing up ct, it was a hell of a ride ✌️,” The Shop wrote in an Instagram post on Dec. 30, announcing its plans to close. “we still have the studio if anyone wants to come record some songs”
Liuzzi, Traver, and Jake Fucci—three New Haven-area musicians—began renting a small band practice space on State Street in Hamden in early 2023. Several months later, after watching a number of local music venues close their doors, they decided to open the space up to an audience. A large, vacant garage adjacent to the practice rooms presented the perfect place to host concerts, and the building’s landlord allowed them to use it for only a marginal increase on their monthly rent.
Traver in the studio with members of Branching Out.
In June, The Shop was born. (The precise location was a secret; in typical DIY fashion, would-be attendees were asked to “DM for address.”)
This was the group’s second attempt at creating a DIY performance venue in Hamden. Their first venture, known as The Church, was located nearby on State and closed in March 2020.
This past summer the State House got shut down, and a bunch of other spots, and I was just like ‘I gotta get back into it, because there’s nothing anywhere,” Liuzzi said. “So we just started having shows.”
Punk, emo, indie, and hardcore bands, both local and from across the country, welcomed the new venue, enthusiastic about the second coming of The Church. The no-frills space—marked only by a sign taped to the wall which read “THE SHOP” in black marker—was almost weekly filled with distorted guitars and sweaty mosh pits. Throughout the summer, people would often congregate in the parking lot outside the venue to hangout and skateboard before shows.
“Every time I went there I was just excited to be there,” said Zeb Mrowka of the band Believe It, It’s Easy. “It was just a good vibe. I’m not a huge fan of bars, personally, so a warehouse space is pretty ideal in my eyes, and I think it embodied that for sure.”
Believe It, It’s Easy played a record release show at The Shop in early November alongside four other bands, which Mrowka described as “a stand-out night for my 2023.”
“The shop was a really special place,” said Matt Srolis, who runs the booking and promotion group Underground Experience, which focuses primarily on the DIY scene in Connecticut. “It really filled a hole in the heart of the New Haven music scene.
But, like so many other DIY venues, The Shop had a short life. In November, the building’s owner notified Liuzzi that he planned to begin renting out the vacant garage—raising the rent well beyond what Liuzzi, Traver, and Fucci were willing to pay. Liuzzi arrived several days later to find that the owner had begun building a wall between the practice space and the garage. Before the drywall was applied, The Shop hosted one final show—attendees climbed through the wood framing on their way into the garage.
“Every other DIY venue, it seems, just kind of comes and goes very quickly,” Liuzzi said.
“None of us make money on it,” he added. “I'm doing it for the enjoyment of watching the show.”
Liuzzi said he wanted to keep ticket prices affordable. Most shows at The Shop cost between $5 and $15. To keep the venue welcoming, they also didn’t sell drinks.
“We don't sell liquor—we don’t have a license—but if we were to sell liquor, we'd be alienating half of our fan base,” Liuzzi said. “All-ages shows are super important for scenes. People came who were 65, 75, once a 10-year-old came with their parents.”
“That it was a place people could go who weren’t 21 yet—a place people could go to have fun and do something besides consuming alcohol—is really what was special about The Shop,” said Srolis.
The Connecticut DIY music scene is losing a treasured venue with the closure of The Shop, but the communal ethos Liuzzi, Traver, and Fucci nurtured is far from gone. The group is still organizing informal shows around the greater New Haven area whenever possible, hosting them in friends’ and relatives’ basements and living rooms.
“I just try to have good shows,” Liuzzi said. “Spotify can tell you only so much, but the only way you can really tell if the band is good is by seeing them live, in my opinion.”
Liuzzi looks into the live room from the recording booth.
Alongside these live shows, Liuzzi, Traver, and Fucci continue to help bands record their music at The Shop. The three are especially interested in analog recording—they use an 8-track tape recorder, something relatively difficult to find in the age of digital audio tools.
“It just makes sense to me,” said Liuzzi. “I like the whole act of rewinding—if you want to do another take, you got to think about what you just did before you listen back.”
“They have an exciting future ahead,” Mrowka said. “Analog recording is coming back, but you gotta love it if you wanna do it.”
“To be able to have affordable analog recording and DIY spirit from someone who’s thrown a bunch of shows, played in a ton of bands—all of this is very good, you feel?”