Czech Radio’s Czeching Project Makes an Appearance at the Prestigious Eurosonic Festival
This year’s edition of the European music festival Eurosonic, held in Groningen in the Netherlands, showcased new and exciting bands. Thanks to Czech Radio, the finalist of the Czeching project – Manon Meurt – also made an appearance.
The prestigious Eurosonic festival presents up-and-coming bands to audiences comprised of not only regular visitors and music fans, but also mainly music industry professionals. The festival programme also features conferences that saw the participation of Czech Radio’s representative, Iva Jonášová, who is in charge of new radio formats. She presented the Czeching project and, together with colleagues from the BBC and radio stations from Iceland, the Netherlands and Denmark, engaged in discussions on the support of local music scenes and up-and-coming bands. Iva Jonášová, manager of the Czeching project, gave us a brief interview.
What did Eurosonic’s visitors find most interesting about the Czeching project?
“At first it was the actual ‘punk’ origin of the Czeching project and our enthusiastic plans – not only regarding the export of the bands – that are typical of emerging projects. The participants of the EBU conference panel paid special attention to our presented model, based on which Czech Radio is not only supposed to support Czech bands, but also to engage with these artists to help them make an impression on young audiences and thus attract new listeners.”
What were the other highlights of Czech Radio’s presence at the festival?
“Hailing from the town of Rakovník, the wonder band Manon Meurt’s concert. They were the only representative from the Czech scene sent to Eurosonic by Radio Wave. They came second in a tight competition with the winner of Czeching 2014, ranking first in the listener charts and making a big impression on foreign music critics.”
Czeching was originally produced as a special series of sessions that took place as part of the regular Čajovna programme on Czech Radio Vltava. This format is now aimed at paving the way for Czech musicians to reach international audiences and supporting alternative Czech music. At the same time, it reminds young audiences, musicians and artists that Czech Radio is among the few radio stations to focus on the export of music.
What is the future for the Czeching project?
“We are currently creating a website and have teamed up with Radio Wave to find a way of tying Czeching more closely with its projects that focus on the support of the visibility of the Czech music scene. We are now recruiting Czech and international jury members for the upcoming edition of the project, which will be officially launched in early September 2015. And using various channels, we are trying to reach music programmers and European radio stations (that we came in contact with at Eurosonic) that target young audiences to ask them for reviews of songs nominated for Czeching and recordings by the winning bands. Our aim is to identify artists that have a chance of making it abroad and to find out to what extent the judgment of the Czech jury is right, or even visionary.”
You can watch the promotional video of the Czeching project here.
Visit the official website of the Czeching project here.