Tania Australian music online, in time Singer, writer, art<strong>is</strong>tic director, and public advocate of the arts, ROBYN ARCHER AO, spoke at the launch of the Australian National Library’s ambitious new project: www.musicaustralia.org Here, Robyn d<strong>is</strong>cusses the goals of the new site and its implications for creators and users of Australian music. Robyn <strong>is</strong> currently Art<strong>is</strong>tic Director, Liverpool European Capital of Culture 2008. By Kathy Grant, Manager, Performance Verification, <strong>APRA</strong> Summer 2002 in California. The rolling green hills of America’s wine country. Six-piece Melbourne band, The Cat Empire, are playing their first ever overseas gig – all expenses paid, with wine and food laid on! Several months earlier, while roughing it at the Adelaide Fringe Festival the band were approached by a stranger with an American accent. He prom<strong>is</strong>ed to fly them to Napa Valley CA to play at h<strong>is</strong> wine auction – But he was true to h<strong>is</strong> word and here they were living it up in the sunshine, playing to some of America’s wealthiest wine moguls. A classy OS debut indeed! Cut to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival a few months later. It’s 3:00 am in the dim, smoky confines of Late‘N’Live, a stand up comedy room notorious for its drunken hecklers. The Cat Empire have begun their first gig of a 15- nights-in-a-row marathon booking. Not quite what they were expecting, but they turn each night into a party. Word travels and suddenly Late‘N’Live becomes THE packed out place to be for a culturally diverse mix of Festival goers fin<strong>is</strong>hing their night on an energetic high. The Cat Empire’s genre-jumping music has been described as “a jazz-soul-hip-hop-Cuban-reggaegypsy amalgamation’ or more succinctly, “a cultural melting pot stirred with a drum stick”. Starting out as a trio, then growing to a six-piece combo, they’ve built their sound through live performances at the tiny jazz clubs of Melbourne, moved on to larger venues, then to big festival stages. After three years of playing together live, The Cat Empire decided to commit their sound to CD in 2003. The debut album, made with the help of family and friends, took eight months and was recorded in a variety of locations including a country house on a macadamia nut farm outside Byron Bay. All tracks were recorded live in a vocal booth fashioned out of mattresses. In keeping with the band’s trademark spontaneity, the recording included the occasional sound of crickets chirping in the warm night air. While recording the album, The Cat Empire played a large number of shows around Byron Bay. They rented a Tarago, toured the east coast of Australia and played their first WOMAD – WOMADelaide, thus making an entry into th<strong>is</strong> prestigious circuit of world music festivals. Tarago touring soon gave way to international flights and gigs around the globe: the UK, USA, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore. An extensive tour of Europe in mid 2004 took the band from the Netherlands to France, Switzerland and Austria, followed by a road trip through Italy to Spain where they played in Barcelona and at the Kesse World Music Festival. The return journey included gigs at the Three Elephants Festival in Lassay les Chateaux, plus Karlsruhe in Germany, and ended with another Edinburgh Fringe. The venue th<strong>is</strong> time was The Famous Spiegeltent. Back in Australia the group were invited to open the 2004 <strong>APRA</strong> Music Awards in Melbourne and their self-titled debut album went double platinum and earned six ARIA nominations. In November 2004 the band headed back to the studio – the Egrem recording studio in Havana, Cuba, that <strong>is</strong>, where Buena V<strong>is</strong>ta Social Club, Cuban<strong>is</strong>mo and many other legends have made musical h<strong>is</strong>tory. The album, Two Shoes, had to be recorded in 28 days. Things began well with drums, bass, percussion, piano and trumpet recorded live together in the first couple of weeks. But dinner at a dodgy diner caused food po<strong>is</strong>oning which floored every member of the band for several days, cutting into time for vocals and over dubs. In the end it was all gr<strong>is</strong>t for the mill for The Cat Empire – Two Shoes was released in April 2005. There’s no <strong>stop</strong>ping them now. At the time of writing the Empire had two more shows to go in the US. New York was sold out with over 18 record labels confirmed to attend. Now that’s Empire building! The line up Felix Riebl percussion, vocals - does most of the writing Ollie McGill piano, melodica, banjo Ryan Monro double bass, guitar Will Hull-Brown drums Jamshid ‘Jumps’ Khadiwala DJ, percussion recently spoke at the launch of Music Australia at the Australian National Library I in Canberra. It was a lively event, hosted by Library Chair Sir James Gobbo and featuring performances by Col Joye, the Stiff Gins, and the Australian Youth Orchestra amongst others. Arts Min<strong>is</strong>ter Rod Kemp officially launched the new website. Why was I there? There are a couple of reasons. Firstly, I have a long association with the Australian National Library to which I have been donating my papers for many years. We often think of the Library as a repository of things we may w<strong>is</strong>h to research, but the fact <strong>is</strong> that the ANL can be a huge resource for us personally. As performing art<strong>is</strong>ts, the things we do are entirely transitory, and while we may have scores and CDs, DVDs and even vinyl to record what we have done in our music, it’s <strong>never</strong> quite the whole picture. The ANL gets interested in papers, photographs, posters, hand drafts of songs, correspondence - the kinds of things which simply rot in a garage somewhere unless someone catalogues and stores them properly. Th<strong>is</strong> service means that if we, or someone else w<strong>is</strong>hes to research our careers, there <strong>is</strong> material evidence. Th<strong>is</strong> resource combined with the Australian Music and Sound Archive (also in Canberra) means that all those years of performances that came and went can be well documented. Secondly, Robyn Holmes, Music Curator for the ANL, showed me Music Australia during its development, and asked if I would be interested in having my website (www. robynarcher.com.au) archived. I readily agreed. Robyn explained they w<strong>is</strong>hed to have a comprehensive record of all music in Australia. While Music Australia <strong>is</strong> currently and understandably weighted towards the past, the desire <strong>is</strong> for th<strong>is</strong> website to document all music from all fields including the most contemporary, and the more scores, h<strong>is</strong>tories of bands, songs etc they have the better. We all know that some projects we do, some bands, have a short time-span even when we w<strong>is</strong>h them to go on for years. By placing copies of CDs and documentation with the Library, and archiving websites on Music Australia, there <strong>is</strong> a permanent record of what a band or writer or performer was doing. Imagine a film, theatre or advert<strong>is</strong>ing producer, from anywhere in the world, searching Music Australia for ideas. Th<strong>is</strong> person, who <strong>is</strong> deliberately not going for the high priced mainstream, comes across something you wrote ten years ago for a band now van<strong>is</strong>hed, and likes it. Bingo – a new opportunity has been created. Even if that seems too good to be true, you can direct interested parties to where they will find evidence of your work, and even at the research level, your work <strong>is</strong> there to be included as a part of the h<strong>is</strong>tory, present and future of Australian music. I’m sure most <strong>APRA</strong> members would be delighted to think that their work has been noticed somewhere. Many art<strong>is</strong>ts have a reluctance simply to hand over scores and websites, but I believe that in th<strong>is</strong> instance the value of preserving what you have done and expanding your profile to a national and h<strong>is</strong>torical stage, far outweighs any danger of inappropriate use in the <strong>is</strong> context. In any case, you can always offer something representative but perhaps sitting in the dark drawer and no longer of commercial value anyway. Music Australia <strong>is</strong> an ambitious project that shows collections from all libraries and resources throughout Australia. Its intention <strong>is</strong> to demonstrate the breadth and depth of Australian music from start to present and already has admirable records of composers, single songs, musicals and performers from classical to contemporary. In that h<strong>is</strong>tory, and that company, it <strong>is</strong> an honour to be able to type in your name and see what work or evidence of yours in held by which collections in Australia, and an even greater thrill for others to be able to get a comprehensive look at what you do, and even see scores online. I’ve been an <strong>APRA</strong> member for many years. I know both the energy and concerns of our membership, and I have no hesitation in recommending Music Australia to you, as a resource and a service. Have a look at the site (www.musicaustralia.org). If you’re not there, or something’s m<strong>is</strong>sing, then only you can help it get better. A P R A P J U L Y 2 0 0 5 > > 0 4