Songs of two girls from Kazakhstan have made it into the semi-finals of International Songwriting Competition 2014 (ISC), Tengrinews reports.
Songs of two girls from Kazakhstan have made it into the semi-finals of International Songwriting Competition 2014 (ISC), Tengrinews reports.
Closer by Nuriya Akhmetova (listed as Milana N a.k.a. LadyNreal) and Desert of Broken Hearts by Aiym Almas were selected for the semi-finals out of 20,000 applications.
Both girls are from Almaty, Kazakhstan. They are completing in the Pop category and both are in Top 40.
Nuriya Akhmetova learned about the contest while surfing the Internet: “I was searching for various international competitions while in my last year at the university in England,” she said. “I began to write songs in 2012 when I bought a keyboard. One day I was playing the keyboard and came up with Closer. I sent the song for the contest. It is a song about my first love and memories of it.”
Nuriya is not planning to sell the song, because it is very special for her and she wants to keep it as a mascot.
Aiym Almas is a student of a music institute in Los Angeles. She has been in music for quite a while already and has a band in the United States. “I learned about the contest from the internet and decided to participate. My aspiration comes from life stories, and some of it is from my fantasies. Nature and everything mystical also inspires me,” she shared.
The ISC is an annual song contest. It provides aspiring and established songwriters with the opportunity to get their songs heard. It has the most prestigious panel of judges of all the songwriting and music contests in the world with celebrities like Dido, Imagine Dragons, Selena Gomez, Keane, Josh Turner, Garbage and Duran Duran. So winning this contest is not only about prize money, but is also an opportunity to get noticed by influential decision-makers in the music industry.
Reporting by Aizhan Tugelbayeva