Performance in Venice

This Window occasionally releases pieces exclusively on YouTube, and this is one of those small, self‑contained vignettes: a field‑recorded fragment shaped into music. The city’s natural acoustics, the soft resonance of the lagoon, and the unpredictable rhythm of daily life form the backbone of the track. It’s less a composition and more a document — a brief, unrepeatable intersection between place, sound and time.

A Rare Performance in Venice

A moment captured in Venice, where the city itself becomes the instrument. The bells you hear are not effects or samples – they are the living soundscape of Venice in full voice.

Piazza San Marco (St Mark’s Square) is the heart of the city, known locally simply as the Piazza. It has long been the centre of Venice’s social, religious and political life, and its daily soundtrack is a shifting cacophony of bells, footsteps, voices, and water echoing through stone.

Watch the performance:

Venice Highlights

Venice is saturated with art, but on this visit I focused almost entirely on the Guggenheim (Palazzo Venier dei Leoni), Peggy Guggenheim’s former home. Inside are two remarkable Pollocks – my favourite being Two (1943–45) – and a typically unsettling Bacon (Study for Chimpanzee) in the European Art collection.

It was also a pleasure to see an original slashed canvas by Lucio Fontana (1899–1968). Today, slashing a canvas might feel like a gimmick, but in Fontana’s time it was a radical act – a direct challenge to the conventions of painting and the surface itself.

These views of Venice have been painted, photographed and reproduced billions of times. They are familiar to generations of travellers, and the walls of galleries around the world groan under the weight of their repetition.

An after thought: The Changing Landscape of Music Distribution

We now have bigger audiences than ever, and distributing music has become almost frictionless. But the question remains: Are we better for it?

The democracy of releasing material has torn a hole straight through the old mainstream record industry. The business models of the 20th century no longer apply. Ironically, the DIY ethos of the Home Tapers – once a fringe movement – has become the new mainstream.

Major labels can no longer justify investing heavily in new stars. Platforms like YouTube, SoundCloud and ReverbNation have turned artists into their own creators, producers, distributors and managers. The cassette – once both object and artwork – has been replaced by the file.

The freedom we craved in the 1970s has finally arrived. But with that freedom comes a new question, one worth repeating: Are we better for it?


Location: Europe

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