MUSIC WEBSITE:Rossella Bottone and Luisella Mazza's lo-fi approach to music interviews is winning online fans, but it's their passion for Irish music that's the driving force behind onemoretune.ie, writes LAUREN MURPHY
‘ONE MORE TUNE.” It’s not exactly the sort of phrase you could imagine a crowd of post-gig revellers in Naples, Rome or Milan chanting, but two Dublin-based Italians have adopted the mantra for their own purposes. Rossella Bottone and Luisella Mazza didn’t know each other before they moved to Dublin – but their common interest in music and media led them to establish Onemoretune.ie in 2008. The website documents the Irish music scene through a series of interviews, conducted with both native artists and international acts that pass through Dublin on their European tours.
Bottone, 35, initially unearthed a love for Irish music through her work for Italian magazine Jam. “It started with The Frames, Nina Hynes and Gemma Hayes in early 2000,” she says. “I was regularly checking what Road Records would suggest on their website, and my brother, who was – and still is – living in Dublin would buy me those records, which were impossible to find in Italy. As a journalist, I covered many Irish artists long before I moved here. I remember flying to Denmark and Germany to see The Frames play and review their concert, as they wouldn’t come to Italy at that time.”
When Bottone moved to Dublin in 2007 – initially for a six-month course at Dublin Business School, having completed a masters in music management and marketing – she looked up Mazza, whose blog she had followed at home in Italy. Mazza, 28, had never been to Ireland before, but was offered a job at Google’s European HQ after spending time in Barcelona. The pair became fast friends, then colleagues at Google and eventually, gig buddies. It was at a Jeffrey Lewis show in 2008, when a spur-of-the-moment interview with the Moldy Peaches frontman was captured on Mazza’s HandyCam, that the idea for Onemoretune.ie was first bandied about.
“We figured we needed to film a good number of interviews before going online – so we recorded interviews for six or seven months, and only after that we launched the website,” says Bottone. “That period of pre-launch interviews was incredibly positive: we would contact well-known artists such as Vyvienne Long, Jape, Saul Williams, Amiina, Ane Brun, and they trusted us, even if there was no trace of the website yet. That openness was very encouraging.”
In the ensuing two years the duo have conducted more than 70 interviews, with Bottone researching and conducting each grilling, and Mazza recording and editing the footage. Some of the international acts in their archive include Wild Beasts, Joan as Policewoman and Roots Manuva, while the Irish contingent is led by the likes of Glen Hansard, Adrian Crowley and Lisa Hannigan.
Their videos are shot in what a diplomatic music critic might call a “lo-fi” manner, but they receive “tens of thousands” of hits every month. Their musings on our music scene have also had some press coverage from BBC Radio, and their love of Irish acts is documented in a regular column for Italy’s Rumore magazine.
Yet despite their dedication, the site is still very much a labour of love. “We don’t consider it as a source of income, it’s rather a hobby. An expensive hobby sometimes,” Bottone laughs.
“The key features of the website are also its challenges,” she adds. “For instance, our interviews are very spontaneous and often scheduled at very short notice – so we had to learn to minimise logistic efforts. [That means] not carrying heavy lights or microphones, just a very light camera – which causes serious quality limitations at the editing stage. But in general, we tend to prioritise spontaneity and a flexible set of quality guidelines versus over-planning and academic set-up – and it seems to work well.”
The pair’s plans for the near future include a documentary feature detailing the intricacies of their site. They plan to feature many of the artists they’ve chatted to over the past two years, although they’re still working on the “ideal format” to cram their growing archive into.
Bottone also co-runs a booking agency called Littlemaps, which has organised Italian tours for Delorentos and Nina Hynes in recent years, and she plans to book more up-and-coming local acts in venues the length and breadth of the boot-shaped peninsula. But what exactly is it about our scene that inspires such zeal in two non-natives?
“It seems music is just in the Irish blood, and in one way or another, it needs to come out,” she smiles. “Dublin also has the major advantage of being a capital city, where most things, including gigs of all size and genres, happen. It’s also ideally located on the way to and from the UK and the US – two key areas for a lot of musicians. Italy is much more fragmented. Even in times of recession, Dublin is a great place to be if you are a music lover. The concentration of venues in town is exceptional, and there is such a variety on offer, from huge festivals to tiny free gigs. It’s like Irish people really need music. And if you talk to young people, it seems like everyone here is in a band, or more than one. It’s just amazing.
“We just wanted to show people abroad how vivid this scene is. People always talk about London and Berlin as the coolest places for music, but Dublin has nothing less than them. It’s just that nobody knows.”
