6 Music picks: Maria and the Gay & Liz Green

Every week we get to play two tracks for Tom Robinson on his excellent BBC 6 Music Introducing show... This week, we sat in for the WHOLE SHOW - hurrah for Tom Robinson! 

You can listen again here.   
 
It was a Girl Music Special so we plugged into some of the latest favourites uploaded onto the Introducing Uploader for two hours of great tracks, aswell as our usual picks for the week below.


*Maria and the Gay - Daddy's Bulge

We are already in love with this DIY Manchester council flat duo (their tags, not ours!). Their debut record Greatest Hits Vol 1 is out on Big Print Records on October 18th, run by Robert from The Nightingales and home of other TOW faves Hotpants Romance. Maria Dada is from Lebanon and Amy Pennington is from 'The North', they make electro-pop and short kick ass indie tunes in their Manchester council flat and are poised to take over the world. With track titles like 'Motherfolkers', 'Pushy Mum' and 'I Wannabe In Democracy', how can you not love them?

LISTEN AND DOWNLOAD HERE:


 
*Liz Green - Hey Joe

  

Liz Green is offering up Hey Joe as a free download and we heartily encourage you to get your hands on it: http://soundcloud.com/lizgreenmusic/hey-joe/s-8lk7H 

The Manchester singer songwriter's debut album O, Devotion is out on Play It Again Sam Records on the 14th November and we can't wait to give the whole thing a spin. News from the Liz Green camp seemed to die down after the hoo ha that surrounded her performance on the main stage at Glastonbury in 2007 (after winning their Emerging Talent comp). It's been 4 years and NOW we can sit back and enjoy a full, fully accomplished and very beautiful record. Hurray!

Here's Displacement Song to listen too while you download:

 

6 Music: Genius Collective & The Liminanas 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.  

Genius Collective - Future (Breaks)



We really like this lot, a bunch of uber talented musicians fronted by one fine singer Kezia Johnson equals something funky, fresh and entirely NOT derivative which is always refreshing. They're a seven piece from Birmingham with an EP due out later in the year, this track Future is a free download - here.

The Liminanas - I'm Dead



This band seemed to have dropped off the face of the planet since releasing this in May last year. We've just stumbled across it and really love what they - were? - doing. This French trio are everything you'd expect from a band like this: dark haired, black polo-neck bedecked skinny kids who you know will survive on nothing but nicotine and Vin Rouge... 

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.