Glastonbury Emerging Talent Competition 2011 - Bands Part 1

Having been approached by the organisers of Glastonbury Festival's Emerging Talent competition late last year, Breaking More Waves is one of 40 UK based music blogs that has been selected to help judge the 2011 competition – the prize for the winner being a main stage slot at the 2011 festival.

Each blog is given an individual list of bands to listen to (in our case around 160) and asked to select its favourite 3, forming the long list of 120 acts which will be published on the Glastonbury website in March, together with the name of the blog that chose the act. The list will also be distributed to all the Glastonbury stage programmers (with listening links and genre details).

The longlist will then be whittled down to a shortlist of just 10 artists by judges including Glastonbury organisers Michael and Emily Eavis and these 10 will be invited to appear at a live final.

The judging process for the long list is simple enough with each judge being sent a selection of the bands that where possible accord with the blogs own preferences in terms of musical genre. At Breaking More Waves we have a fairly broad spectrum of taste and have therefore found ourselves listening to a mixed bag of music.

At this stage in the process we’ve listened to at least 1 song by every band in our cluster and have begun the process of whittling the 160 down to a more manageable number that we intend to listen to more before selecting our final 3. At this stage we’ve not made any firm decision – sometimes the most important ingredient of great music is time and we intend to give the acts we’re enjoying some more of that.

Our own criteria for choosing an act is does the music grab us, excite us and move us emotionally in some way? Does the act sound amazing or even better, do they sound A.M.A.Z.I.N.G ? Ultimately are they worthy of Worthy Farm?

As we continue the judging process the festival has very kindly agreed to blogs being able to feature some of the acts they are enjoying prior to the publication of the longlist.

A disclaimer is required here; just because we feature a band from our cluster group here on the blog does not necessarily mean that they will form part of our final three. We’re still considering the acts and no decisions have been made yet. In fact, our final three may contain acts that we’re not featuring here at all.

So without further ado, here comes the first of four posts, each featuring two of the bands that we’ve discovered through the competition. Enjoy and maybe let us know what you think? Our first two acts are Leaving Atlantis and Cloud Castle Lake.

Leaving Atlantis describe their music as progressive electroacoustic pop and are based in London, Copenhagen and Helsinki, and we guess that they have been allowed into the entries because of their London base - as acts have to be from the UK or Ireland. Having already gained some play on Amazing Radio, the only UK station dedicated to exclusively playing emerging and independent music ( a station that featured Breaking More Waves as their website of the week in January) they have also been hailed as Soundclouder of the Week. The song we have selected from their repertoire is Paradise, a sensual piece of gentle electronic bliss but we also strongly recommend the string laden and weighty Solitaire which you can listen to here.

Paradise (Dec.) by Leaving Atlantis

The second band we’re featuring are Cloud Castle Lake from Dublin, Ireland, whose song A Wolf Howling is constructed from a repetitive beat, textured atmospheric guitar noise and near falsetto vocals that have an element of Radiohead to them – it’s a song to utterly lose yourself in.

A Wolf Howling by cloudcastlelake