Czeching winner to be decided at Metronome Festival

The winner will be given the opportunity to make a single and a video clip, perform at the prestige Eurosonic Noorderslag showcase festival in Holland, and participate in a workshop with a professional coach. All the nominees will perform on the Radio Wave stage on Saturday, 22 June 2019 as part of Czeching Showcase, which this year is taking place at the Metronome Festival in Prague.

The Czeching project (which is organised by Radio Wave, Czech Radio's channel for young people) has been helping the Czech music scene to find its way abroad since 2013. Thanks to its collaboration with Metronome Festival and the Czech pro-export bureau SoundCzech, this year Czeching is focussing primarily on live playing. That is one of the reasons that the international jury, with more than 20 experts from 15 countries - most of them music experts from radio stations such as the BBC, Puls, Radio France, FM4, etc. - has grown to include newbies from many music festival organisers. This year for the first time, the dramaturges of the Eurosonic Noorderslag and MENT festivals will be joined by representatives from the likes of Waves Vienna and Budapest Showcase Hub.

Nominations for this year's Czeching from Radio Wave have been awarded to garage rockers Branko's Bridge, with their distinctively energetic show; the Margo project, formed around singer and composer Aneta Martínková; Market, with their guitar music that revels in sampling; the idiosyncratic Nylon Jail, which outgrew its electro-country box a long time ago; and, last but not least, Viah, an electro-pop singer of Vietnamese origin.

All the nominees are to play concerts as part of the traditional Czeching Showcase event, which is happening on 22 June 2019 and will for the first time be part of the Metronome Festival in Prague, where Radio Wave will have its own stage. It is there, too, that the international jury is to announce this year's winner. The evening will finish up with a concert by the Icelandic hip-hop group Reykjavíkurdætur. This all-female rapper group bewitched the audience at this year's Eurosonic, and the "daughters of Reyjkjavík" are also one of the biggest names at the Pohoda festival in Slovakia. The band WWW and the Floex & Tom Hodge music project will also appear on stage and acts such as British singer-songwriter Lauran Hibberd, The Ills, Khoiba and Manon Meurt will perform on this podium Friday, 21 June.

"I've been following Czeching since its very beginnings; the first year I even had the opportunity to be one of the jury members and nominate projects. So I'm delighted that the imaginary circle is closing, that Metronome Festival is linking up with Czeching and that the finals are going to take place on the Radio Wave stage. New, talented bands are an integral part of the festival, so don't miss out and be sure to be there when one of the finalists rockets into the big wide world," said Barbora Šubrtová, the Metronome Festival Programme Head.

Also planned as part of the Radio Wave programme are a meeting of the international jury members, the nominated Czeching bands and music professionals from the Czech Republic; a public debate on the anniversary of the Velvet Revolution; and an educational workshop, Czeching Skills, organised with the support of the pro-export bureau SoundCzech.

Over the past years Czeching has dispatched bands such as Wild Tides, VR/NOBODY and Himalayan Dalai Lama as well as singers and composers Never Sol, Zagami Jericho and, in 2018, Hellwana on their journey towards a foreign audience. Hellwana speaks highly about participating in the project: "Czeching helped us astonishingly. Above all Eurosonic, apart from getting important contacts for us, also showed us how hard we would have to work on ourselves, from more than just the musical aspect." This up-and-coming singer is currently preparing a successor to the Love Game video clip and getting herself ready for a number of performances abroad, for example at European Day in Tel Aviv, Israel, in May; at Nu Sound of Visegrad in Banska Stiavnica, Slovakia; and at The Kennedy Center in Washington in June.

You can find more information about the project and the nominees on rozhlas.cz/czeching and wave.cz.