Soundwaves Awards 2015

We brought together, we guided and we watched the 5 Soundwaves Artists create their own bands, songs, music videos and marketing campaigns.. and we’ve been blown away! If you haven’t seen the five singles by Soundwaves Artists Broken Crayons, Snasta, The Raras, Broken Heavens and Advanced Utopia yet, you’ve just gotta give them a watch. Now, it’s time to give out some well deserved awards!

Soundwaves has 7 awards highlighting the main parts of the Soundwaves experience; Music Composition, Lyrics, Music Video, Social Media, Innovation, Achievement and the overall Soundwaves Arist of the Year – the artist that excelled in all categories. To be honest we could have given Artist of the Year to any one of the Soundwaves Artists, they’ve all been so amazing this year! But unfortunately we could only choose one, as well as only one winner for the other Soundwaves awards. But overall we couldn’t be prouder – they’re all so well deserved!
So who won what? Drumroll please….

If you’ve ben following the Soundwaves Project you’ll know we’ve been encouraging all of the Soundwaves artists to market themselves on Social Media; create a fanbase online and connect with them. All of the artists took to it like ducks to water, but Broken Heavens interaction with their online fans was unprecendented. They’ve accumulated a huge amount of likes, shares and retweets – clearly the internet is impressed with Broken Heavens, as are we! Check out Broken Heavens on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and see what all the fuss is about. Congratulations!

The Innovation Award was created because of the incredible creativity and innovation shown among the young people throughout the Soundwaves project. At the very beginning, the band line-ups could have ben periceved as challenging. We had trombones, uileann pipes, accordions, fiddles, cellos, violins, saxophones and clarinets merging with classic band instruments like guitars, bass and drums. We were intrigued at how the young people would interpret these unusual collaborations. One particular band, Snasta, knocked it out of the park, which is why they have won the Innovation Award! Merging their traditional irish music backgrounds and jazz backgrounds to create a new genre they have nicknamed ‘Trazz’ their song ‘Near and Far’ is a hypnotic, groovy and exciting world folk song. Soundwaves HQ genuinely can’t get enough of it! Who would have thought saxophone, fiddle, Uilleann pipes, jazz piano and vocals would work so well together? Check it out for yourself here!

Everyone has achieved a ridiculous amount during the Soundwaves project, but this award goes to the band who achieved the most in their marketing campaign for their single launch. That hands down had to be Advanced Utopia – who managed to get blogged about in 3 major blogs  – Donegal Daily, Remys Music and Film blog and Soundfeed, and even got their track played on The Lost Broadcast radio show – no mean feat for a brand new band! Its worth noting they managed to drum up that buzz all by themselves on their week off at home too. Amazing and Well Done!

Although all the bands composed completely different and impressive music in their own right, we had to give The Raras the Music Composition Award for creating such an awesomely chilled out and happy vibe! With beautiful uses of fiddles, flutes and wicked harmonies, their song ‘Day Into Night’ is fantastic and definitely transports you into the world of The Raras. Its a world we at Soundwaves could spend a considerable amount of time in! Well worth a listen here, you’ll be dreaming of it all day. Congratulations The Raras!

For their brilliantly uplifting and hopeful lyrics, Broken Crayons has won the Lyrics Award! Their theme of emigration from Ireland, and the associated fears, hopes and dreams that come with it is a pretty epic one. They capture the wonderings and worries of young people fantastically, and its beautiful to hear! Our favourite line has to be ‘Never let your fears decide your future.’ Excellent wisdom to live by and to sing along to, listen to all the lyrics in their song Fear/Future here!

Broken Heavens music video for ‘Time Machine’ teaches us that all you need to escape from a rubbish day, is a time machine. Or a great imagination – which Broken Heavens have in spades! This band were so creative not only while deciding the concept and during the shoot day, but also in editing, where they figured out some really cool effects for the time travel part of their video. The end result is so much fun and their enthusiasm, hard work and creative thinking had to be acknowledged in the form of the Music Video Award! Not only that, in 3 weeks they’ve managed to get over 1,700 views. Incredible! Watch the video here

This band has been impressing us from the get go. They gelled amazingly as a group, wrote a killer song, were total pros in the pop-up recording studio. They created a phenomenal music video and were full of ideas for absolutely everything we did in the Soundwaves project. They went above and beyond with social media (they were definitely the most active group on twitter, and they even created their own blog!) and their music video got the most views and the most likes out of the lot. It says a lot to be named Artist of The Year among the amazing bands created in Soundwaves 2015, they had really tough competition and we couldn’t have asked for a better group of young musicians to work with! But this bands achievements and enthusiasm in all areas of the project needed to be acknowledged. We are proud to call Advanced Utopia Soundwaves Artist of the Year 2015. Congratulations Advanced Utopia!

Wow! I think we can agree that the young talent in Soundwaves is scarily amazing at everything they do. We’ve loved seeing their bands, friendships and musicianship develop. But the project isn’t over yet! We’re preparing for our big concert on the 6th of September in the RCC in Letterkenny, where all the bands will perform their songs. Not only that, this week we’ve put everyone together into one Supergroup, and we’ve been creating even more amazing new music as a big group of 30, crazily talented and creative young musicians. You’ll definitely want to be at the concert to see it in person, and we will be handing out the prizes for these awards on the night too! Also, don’t forget you can download the singles for free off of bandcamp, so you can listen to the Soundwaves Artists whenever you want!

Last but not least, Soundwaves HQ want to say a huge thank-you to everyone who has watched the music videos and shared about the project online. And a massive thank you to all the supporting organisations – Wall2Wall Music, DMEP, Music Generation and the Arts Council – without you all none of this would have happened. Seeing the finished project I think we can all agree it was worth it!

Stay tuned to hear more about our big concert on September 6th.
In the meantime, congratulations to Advanced Utopia, Broken Heavens, Snasta, The Raras and Broken Crayons!