Original Music showreel

Musetta is Marinella Mastrosimone and me. We formed in Milan in 2006 and were playing live within the year, Heineken Jammin' Festival, Arezzo Wave, Rock Contest, MTV Day, alongside fashion shows for Romeo Gigli, Krizia and Enrico Coveri, which is how a lot of Milanese bands paid their rent.

The shows were always audio-visual, and that came out of cinema rather than out of stagecraft. Hardboiled American noir and the French version of it, Italian neorealism, retro-futurism, the Italian design of the fifties, Munari.

Nothing went on stage without something on screen, because we weren't hearing the music separately from the image in the first place.

We came at the sound from opposite ends. Marinella's ear was formed by Italian seventies prog and Indian classical music; mine by jazz study, then Kraftwerk and krautrock. Musetta was the argument between those two, settled somewhere in downtempo and trip-hop.

The lyrics were anti-capitalist and often flatly revolutionary. The music was soft enough that most people missed it. We ended up on chillout compilations, filed under lounge, with the words printed right there on the sleeve.

The debut, Mice to Meet You! , arrived in 2008 on IRMA. Two of the tracks were covers, the Komeda lullaby from Rosemary's Baby, and "Underneath the Mango Tree" from Dr.

No. Every cover we've ever done came from a film we loved; it's a habit, not a strategy.

Rob Ellis (PJ Harvey, Placebo, Tricky) came in on the production for a few of the songs and sang backing vocals on "Another Glimpse of Sun".

We put "Ophelia's Song" out under a Creative Commons licence early enough that it was still an odd thing for a signed act to do. It came back as a flood of remixes and ended up the most remixed track on ccMixter.

The same song appears on David Miles Huber's Colabs, nominated for Best Surround Album at the 52nd Grammy Awards. "Peace and Melody" climbed the Beatport charts and turned up in sets from Pete Tong, John Digweed and Sasha.

Records and EPs followed through Armada, Morrison Recordings, Fall From Grace and Sony: Nicotine, Red Star, Standing by My Side, then Ultramarine, Telescope (Pino Donaggio's theme from De Palma's Body Double, the same habit twelve years on), and Atlantide.

The screen credits came from sync, not scoring. Existing tracks placed under picture: Enough Said, The Past Is a Foreign Land, Star Crossed, Better Call Saul, Elementary, House of Lies, and a run of fashion campaigns.

We've never written to a brief, and that's probably why the placements work: a supervisor picks a record that already has its own logic rather than commissioning something to fill a gap.

The most recent collaboration is with Tomas Dvorak, Floex. "Nel Blu" on his album Zorya is a six-handed track: his arrangement, our lyrics, Marinella's vocal, cut at our studio in Milan.

We took it on stage with him too, including Akropolis in Prague. He'd been a long-standing inspiration well before any of that.

The visual half of the band eventually ate both our careers. I became a film colourist. Marinella went into graphic design and then UX. Marinella is still in Milan. I'm in Melbourne. We still make records, 10,100 miles away.