6 Music: Silver Fox & Trogons our picks for Introducing

Every week we get to play two tracks for Tom Robinson on his excellent BBC 6 Music Introducing show... you can listen again here. 


Silver Fox - Waves On In

 Daniel Robson

We are utterly smitten with this four piece from Newcastle. From the woozey, lazy psychedelia of Waves On In to the short, sharp punk of Capital Kiss. We found them via Upset The Rhythm's excellent line up for the Yes Way festival last month, where we also spotted this lovely lot:

Trogons - Awakenings

    

Trogons release Awakenings very soon on X Ray Recordings, we love the urgency in the track and Gemma Fleet on vocals is ticking all our boxes.

Thanks to UTR for some ace tips!

Gaggle choir leader Deborah Coughlin spills the beans

 

As anarchic all-woman choir Gaggle prepare for their performance of The Brilliant and The Dark at London's Royal Albert Hall on 27 September, TOW catches up with leader Deborah Coughlin about the who, what, when, where and why's and it's really not what you might think!

The opera, which is about the history of women from Middle Ages to World War II, was first performed in 1969 with a cast of 1,000 women volunteering at the same venue.

Deborah and Gaggle have brought the subject matter right up to the present day in their reworking of the piece. Amazed that such a historic event could have been lost from the history books Gaggle are looking to give it it's rightful place in cultural her-story.  


The Brilliant and The Dark from Open Music Archive on Vimeo.

6 Music: Wild Flag & Elan Tamara our picks for Introducing

Every week we get to play two tracks for Tom Robinson on his excellent BBC 6 Music Introducing show... you can listen again here.

Wild Flag - Glass Tambourine


Wild Flag performs Glass Tambourine at The Rock Shop, Brooklyn from BlearyEyedBrooklyn.com on Vimeo.

 
Bloomin' brilliant to have Sleater-Kinney guitarist Carrie Brownstein back in the saddle with a fierce line up of Mary Timony (Helium), Janet Weiss (Quasi, Sleater-Kinney) and Rebecca Cole (The Minders). Takes TOW back to the mid-nineties, an indie disco night called Lipgloss and wishing to all hell we'd not given up playing guitar. Wild Flag rrrrrrock, a welcome relief from all the flimsy-hipster-electro trash knocking about.

Elan Tamara - Don't Know Why

Original songwriting and a talented musician, Elan Tamara has everything going for a young upstart. Especially when up and coming producer Kwes (DELS, The Invisible, The XX, and now of Warp Records) gets involved and Ninja Tune put out her Organ EP. The kind of artist that makes TOW's blood boil when watching the fawning praise over the numpties on X Factor who knock out pretty good rendition of a Christina Aguilera tune or two. Sigh. They look for clones, we look for uniqueness and Elan has that in spades.

TOW favourite 2diceproductionz made this EPK for Elan last year, in our hood - Walthamstow Marshes:

Brigid Power-Ryce & Micropixie - BBC 6 Music Introducing

Brigid Power-Ryce - The Waves Were Wild
 
   


Brigid Power-Ryce is a TOW success story... back in May 2009 we played Wild Grin for Tom on the show and he loved it, we loved it and then it all went silent. Until we got an email a few months back from Brigid with new songs, a six month old son and a support slot with Tune-Yards and Beirut at Brixton Academy on September 16th - yeeeeha! The  new stuff is as captivating as what we heard before - eerie, haunting and beautiful. See you on the 16th!

*Micropixie - Testosteronica

    
  
Micropixie sent us this little disco-funk gem a few weeks ago, from her album 'The Good, The Beige & The Ugly' (An Intergalactic Feminist Spy Thriller) on One Little Alien. Micropixie has made the track with UK-based, Grammy nominee Paul Horton and it's massively groovy. Micropixie says of herself: 'Made in Bombay, born & raised in the UK, and based in SF-Oh!, Micropixie aka MPX is the extra-terrestrial alter ego of writer, fillum-maker and fulltime human being, Single Beige Female.'

The song is about Micropixie's experiences in the music industry - 'Testosteronica', ah hem, a sentiment that's right up our street! Also, 10% of the sales from Testosteronica will go to Women's Audio Mission, a San Francisco based, non-profit organization dedicated to the advancement of women in music production and the recording arts. Here here!

Cambodian Space Project & Mary Ocher - BBC 6Music Introducing

Every week we get to play two tracks for Tom Robinson on his excellent BBC 6 Music Introducing show... you can listen again here.

The Cambodian Space Project - Broken Flowers

Kak Channthy is the lead singer of Phnom Penh Band The Cambodian Space Project. She's been called the Rock MIA in Asia, with which we wholeheartedly take umbrage. MIA wishes she had an iota of Kak's edge. Not only is she now a rock diva in her homeland, but she's also a women's rights activist, enlisted by the UN to speak in her country. As a young woman Kak was kidnapped from her village and sold into sex slavery in Phnom Penh - but her escape and meeting with now co-pilot Australian guitarist Julien Poulsen, has turned her life around. Julien found his muse and his route into fulfilling his dream of revitalising Cambodia's psychedelic rock days, with echoes of 1960's Cambodian singing legend Ros Seretysothea. Broken Flowers is an original track, but do also check out their covers of Venus and House of the Rising Sun too, as Kak admits she sings rock music better than love songs... we say, rock on...

Mary Ocher - On The Streets Of Hard Labour

We've just spent half an hour watching Mary Ocher videos on youtube, mainly the ones from her War Songs album which is from 2008, but luckily for us who were late to catch on, she re-released in March of this year on Germany's fine Haute Areal Records. Describing her is tough. Born in Moscow and raised in Tel Aviv, now based in Berlin. Mary describes herself as a singer-songwriter, poet, and DJ, with a background in film. Excellent. You might remember her from Mary and The Baby Cheeses who were a 'highly noted band in the Israeli underground circles'. All we know is that On The Streets of Hard Labour is one of tracks of the year, we love her heavily accented singing in English, the sparseness of the music: electronic, contemporary and yet definite shades of a spooky Soviet past.

Alice & the Enemies and Rachael Dadd - BBC 6Music Introducing

After a summer break, TOW is back with Tom Robinson on his brilliant BBC 6 Music Introducing show as his Girl Music Guru, bringing him two artists every week for his (and your) listening pleasure. You can tune in and listen again here. Last week it was Tiny Ruins and Emma Heartbeat, this week:

Alice & the Enemies - Touching Boys in Supermarkets

You know Alice Gun? The singer songwriter from north London who made her fantastic debut this year with Blood & Bone on Ambiguous Records? Well, guess what, she was in a rock band and Ambiguous have decided to re-release some old stuff - yeahhh! The frankly brilliant Touching Boys In Supermarkets... listen below. This is Alice pre-poised, almost regal, as she is now - it's all a bit raucous and sweaty, we love it. You can hear Alice talking about Blood & Bone on The Other Woman Podcast here.




Rachael Dadd  - Tower Tower

Bristol's Rachael Dadd has travelled far and wide in her time, so far in fact that she made this record in Japan. Dedicees will know that she's married to Ichi - as in Ichi and the Hand, see them live on the same bill and you get a doubly awesome earful. Rachael's new album Bite The Mountain is the follow up to 2009's Moth in the Motor and, as described by Broken Sound Music on their website, she sounds 100% the wide eyed traveller and armed with banjo, uke and a multitude of other instruments she's the master of, she's created another quiet masterpiece. 

  

Albums from Olivia Louvel and Botched Fairytale

Olivia Louvel sent us a new track back in March 2009 - the spiky, moody, bass heavy Army Of Dolls... little did we know that it was just the beginning of a whole album, Doll Divider, from the French born composer and producer. We played the track for Tom Robinson on his 6 Music Introducing show, he loved it, we loved it and that was that. Or so we thought... we received a beautiful vinyl copy of Olivia's album in the post a month or so ago. Composed using synth loops and percussive rhythms on her laptop, the album is glitchy, mysterious, DIY, minimal... all those good things, if not simultaneously unnerving. You can listen and BUY at her Bandcamp here:



Botched Fairytale




Deejaying at the excellent John Peel Day at Bloomsbury Bowling Lanes last year, we were approached only once during our set and it was when we played The '06 Census by Botched Fairytale. The young chap was saucer-eyed and almost frothing at the mouth about the track, which is exactly how we felt on first listen to this, their debut album. Marie O Hara and Mariel McCormack are from County Longford in Ireland and were inspired to make music back in 2008 when, they say:

"sick of sitting around complaining about the lack of lyrical content in the Irish music they heard on the radio, the duo formed because they wanted to do their bit for the situation. 

They had a vision of an album that provoked, it would be blunt and unsafe and uncomfortable, full of ideas and energy that reflected the ugliness and beauty of everyday life, an album that was universally relevant but distinctly Irish."


The album is available FOR FREE at the Bandcamp player above, thanks for giving this away free girls - it's a real gift to the music world.