THE label which released a record in the running for a £20,000 cash prize is to launch a set of EPs by some of the country’s most exciting emerging artists.

Released on Olive Grove, Impossible Stuff by Carla J Easton was named as one of the albums on the longlist for the Scottish Album of the Year at an event last week in Edinburgh, the prestigious award’s new home.

Easton’s album, the second solo effort from leader of girl group TeenCanteen, was whittled down from almost 300 records submitted for the award.

Like fellow longlisters such as Free Love, Chvrches, Edwyn Collins, Aidan O’Rourke, piper Brighde Chaimbeul and 2015 winner Kathryn Joseph, Easton has to wait until 9pm on August 15 to hear if Impossible Stuff is announced on BBC Radio Scotland as one of the 10 final albums in contention for the prize.

Each runner-up will be awarded £1000, with the winner picking up £20,000 at the SAY award ceremony at the Assembly Rooms on September 6.

Easton says the title refers to the “chances and risks” she took with the record.

“So many times it looked like it might not even happen,” she says. “Impossible Stuff, and the way it keeps changing my life, continues to surprise me in ways I never anticipated.”

Easton adds: “To have it included alongside so many other incredible works by other artists in the SAY award longlist astounds me. It’s the album I have always wanted to make and I went into the studio with the attitude of ‘make this as though it’s the last thing you ever do’.”

Impossible Stuff marks the first time Olive Grove have had an album longlisted for the award.

Set up in 2010 by music bloggers Halina Rifai and Lloyd Meredith, the much-loved Glasgow independent label made its name releasing music from the likes of Jo Mango, Woodenbox, Campfires In Winter and Randolph’s Leap.

Now, with the Archipelago EPs, Olive Grove return to their music-blogging roots, serving up a series of tracks from six emerging artists based across Scotland.

“I’ve been running the label for nine years now and I had been thinking a lot about the ethos we had when Halina and I started Olive Grove,” says Meredith.

“Coming from a blogging backround, we both wanted to give a platform to smaller bands and artists we loved. I felt I had moved away from that a little bit by working with more established acts and I wanted to go back to that original idea of Olive Grove being very much a grassroots thing of getting involved with emerging artists; of using my experience to helping them at the start of their career.”

Over the coming months Olive Grove will release three 12-inch vinyl EPs, each side of which will feature five or six tracks by artists such as Circle Meets Dot (Mango’s project with US songwriter A. Wesley Chung aka The Great Albatross), Henry And Fleetwood, Moonsoup and Pocket Knife, a new boy-girl duo from Glasgow.

Next week sees the release of the first two volumes of the Archipelago EPs which feature tracks by Jared Celosse and Chrissy Barnacle, two singular artists with sounds and styles that set them apart.

Glasgow-based singer-songwriter Barnacle and Celosse, a musician with roots in the Netherlands, England and the Czech Republic, will launch their volumes at a gig at the city’s Old Hairdressers.

“The Archipelago EPs feature a collection of artists who I think each have got something really special,” says Meredith, who notes he has spent years trying to convince Barnacle to go into the studio to record her idiosyncratic folk-pop.

“Chrissy’s something of a cult artist,” he says. “Apart from some home recordings and a demo at Chem19, she hasn’t recorded that much.

"I really wanted her to record something, just to capture her talent. I had first seen her doing a support slot years ago and thought she was amazing. What she’s done for us, I’m really pleased with.”

In an exclusive for The National, Barnacle’s tracks are streaming on our website from today.

LAST year Olive Grove released Four Cold Walls, the captivating debut EP by Celosse, who now calls Glasgow home. Just days before Meredith announced the Archipelago project, Celosse was named as the inaugural winner of the Stewart Cruickshank Bursary, a fund set up in memory of the producer and broadcaster who died in 2015.

“He’s got a choice of things he can do with it,” says Meredith. “He has the chance to record in Chem19, have the experience of working in a proper big studio, whereas the tracks on Archipelago, some of that was home-recorded, some was recorded in Prague, where he grew up. Hopefully it will help him to keep building on what he’s already got, which is very special and so different to anything else I’ve heard in Scotland in a while.”

Recorded with funding from Creative Scotland’s National Lottery Distribution Fund, the Archipelago EPs are part of “probably the most stressful project” Meredith says he’s taken on, due to the numbers of individuals involved and the different strands of the endeavour.

As well as a series of recordings and live events, the Archipelago EPs are each part of large artwork by designer – and Mitchell Museum bassist – Kris Ferguson.

Produced using recycled coloured vinyl pellets within the record plant, each individual pressing of the Archipelago EPs is unique.

When the last record is released in early 2020, fans will be able to place Ferguson’s three covers side by side, creating a large vista showing a city which looks a lot like Glasgow merging with countryside and Japanese buildings.

“It’s an idea from Japanese anime, which Kris really ran with,” says Meredith. “When you see them at first, it looks as though they won’t match up, but they will, and the effect is really stunning.”

Tickets to all launch gigs and EPs are available via Olive Grove’s “continental subscription” at bit.ly/OliveGroveEPs

August 9, The Old Hairdressers, 7pm, Glasgow. www.olivegroverecords.com