Riondino: 'Few private funds, public support needed'

'Companies still don't have much confidence in investing in cultural enterprises, so a reality like Puglia Sounds is fundamental for us'. So says Michele Riondino, an actor and director with a penchant for music, who is now also the artistic director of the Cinzella Festival after a challenging experience in organising the 1st of May in Taranto. It was precisely the city of the two seas that proved to be central in the encounter between Puglia Sounds (which organises the Medimex festival there) and Cinzella, since the event led by Riondino focused on a playbill halfway between electronic and post-punk. 'In recent years we have tried to upgrade internationally,' explains Riondino, 'and the existence of public tenders is indispensable for us. But Puglia Sounds also offers us a platform for promotion and can be instrumental in strategically planning support for the music industry.

The resources made available by Puglia Sounds do not only focus on live music, but also on record production, which over the years has seen active support for record labels to produce albums and multimedia projects. 'For me, Puglia Sounds has been an excellent work accelerator,' says Luigi Fasanella, A&R of Faro Records, a label established 16 years ago to follow a handful of local artists. 'Over the years, these music projects have taken international routes and Puglia Sounds has helped me to shorten distances, open up a much wider range of contacts and export the music of the artists I represent'.

The crossover between creativity and public relations has in fact allowed Fasanella to deal with the world of television, and in 2015 one of the Bari-based artists on his roster, rock singer-songwriter Giò Sada, won the ninth edition of the talent show X Factor. Today, Fasanella's work has expanded into management, publishing and managing music catalogues for third parties. Institutional tenders also allow him to move easily between mainstream and independent, for example with the new Kallax Records, a label born out of the need to support artists with a strong expressive identity but far removed from commercial logics.

With a sound market that is by now globalised, dematerialised and compartmentalised, international dynamics become an attractive opportunity even for those concerned with territorial artistic identity. This is the case of Zero Nove Nove, a label and management and booking agency that manages musicians of world extraction, whose balance sheet is fundamentally based on activity abroad.

'The international vision in us is innate,' explains Giuseppe Bortone, CEO of Zero Nove Nove from Salento. The export office is the basis of our work and our artists have performed in Europe, Latin America, Asia, Australia and beyond. Perhaps we could have done it without the support of the institutions, but Puglia Sounds has been decisive especially for our emerging musicians, who have gained experience and improved their artistic curriculum thanks to the measures made available to them'.