While we have been busy in the past days with moving to a new server, as well as renaming and rebranding our website from esc-chat.com to escgo!, the Eurovision world kept turning!

In the meantime, three countries have selected and confirmed their participants for Vienna: Armenia, Italy and Israel.

Armenia have decided to send a group called Genealogy to Eurovision, where they will compete with the song “Don’t Deny“. The project features six artists from all five continents. The underlying idea is to unite on the Eurovision stage international artists of Armenian origin whose families left Armenia in 1915.

So far, only one member of Genealogy is known: Essaï Altounian, a singer and composer from France.

photo: Public Television of Armenia

Italy’s entrants, Il Volo, are the lucky winners of the traditional Sanremo festival, which was held over several days last week. It had already been decided that the winners of Sanremo would be given the right to represent the country at Eurovision, but could decide themselves whether to accept the offer or not. As it turns out, Il Volo will be indeed representing Italy in Vienna, and it has now also been confirmed that their Sanremo-winning song, “Grande amore“, will be their ESC entry – meaning it will have to be edited down from its current length of 3 minutes 45 seconds.

photo: ilvolomusic.com

Israel, which used the casting show הכוכב הבא (Rising Star) as the selection format for its Eurovision artist, will be represented in Vienna by Nadav Guedj. The 16-year-old singer won the competition yesterday evening, with the results coming from a mix of jury and app-based public voting. The last time Israel sent a male solo singer to ESC was also the last time they qualified, namely with Harel Ska’at in 2010.

photo: Ortal Ziv Dahan

And on the subject of countries whose artists are known but whose songs have not yet been revealed, Montenegro‘s state broadcaster RTCG today announced that Knez‘s song for ESC 2015 will be written by none other than repeat participant Željko Joksimović, whose last involvement with the contest was a 3rd place as the Serbian representative in Baku in 2012.