Death in Venice
The past few days have been a blur: packing the house for the relocation company, getting 51 boxes to fit into a 280 cubic-feet crate, selling the rest of our stuff away and donating the rest of the unsold items to families who would use an extra bed or a coffee table, cleaning the house for the landlord’s inspection, and generally sleeping a lot less than required.
It all feels good though, and I will write more about the process of moving, and what it means to us as a family, in a longer post.
We set up a bandcamp.com page for amberhaze, at long last. It seems that this platform has been quite successful in allowing customers to purchase cheaper and better sounding versions of what you can find on itunes or other major mp3 sites. I like the fact that you can choose your bitrate resolution, and the name-your-price option seems fair. As many artists have pointed out, making tons of money out of music is out of the question at this point, and if it means that greedy A&R’s and shortsighted majors will be out of business, then so be it. If it means that independently released artists and small labels have to work hard to promote their humble releases, then so be it. But it puts you, the listener, at an advantageous position: you get to fund our art directly, and though your contribution may be smaller in mere monetary considerations, we do keep more of your generous support in return. In a way, it’s a throwback to the medieval concept of the artist and the patron, and it’s not all that bad a deal. Au contraire.
Death in Venice was a track that we recorded during the album sessions. I started recording it at my parents’ house in Italy, and Nick put in the finishing touches during mixing.
The track is inspired by the eponymous short story by Thomas Mann, a reflection on ageing, the relevance of art and the difficulty to find inspiration around us. I can find a lot of resonance in Mann’s writing, even though he sometimes displays a penchant for affectation that I don’t always find easy to get into. And of course, this story is also complemented by the wonderful opera by Benjamin Britten, and the visual testament of Luchino Visconti.
The song is free with all downloads of the album. Hope you like it.
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