Silent Recordings
Unpredictable Music for
Unreliable Times

Artists:

CODA
Prop
Telemetry Orchestra
Tracky Dax

Compilations:

Around The Block
Nocturnal Emissions
Silent Soundtracks
Sounds of Silent
This Show Is About People

Rouseabout Records
Keeping it Real

Artists:

Bondi Cigars
Cathie O'Sullivan
Colin Dryden
Creedence Clearwater Revisited
The Celebrated Knackers & Knockers Band
Donna Fisk and Michael Cristian
Eric Bogle
Fiddlers Feast
Gary Shearston
Gordon Lightfoot
Herb Superb
Johnny Wade
Jim Low
John Munro
Julie Wilson
Koori Classic
Kym Pitman
Marcus Holden
Mic Conway's National Junk Band
Ngarukuruwala
Nyalgodi Scotty Martin
Robyn Archer
Roger Knox
Russell Morris
The Newtown Rugby League Football Club Song
Warren Fahey & Luke Webb
Warren Fahey & Max Cullen (DEAD MEN TALKING)

Compilations:

Before the Boomerang Came Back
Down By The Billabong
The World Turned Upside-Down
Forte – Golden Fiddlers
Stand Up & Shout

Yesterday's Australia:

Barbara James
Bob Dyer
Bobby Limb
Buddy Williams
Dame Nellie Melba
Florence Austral
Frank Coughlan
John Brownlee
Johnny Ashcroft
Keith Branch & His South Sea Islanders

Percy Grainger
Reg Lindsay
Shirley Thoms
Smoky Dawson
Strella Wilson
Tex Morton
Tex Morton and Sister Dorrie
Warren Fahey's Diggers

Yesterday's Australia Compilations:

Australian Radio Serials
Australian Hillbilly Radio Hits
Australian Stars of the International Music Hall Voume 1
Australian Stars of the International Music Hall Voume 2
Band in a Waistcoat Pocket
Mastertouch Pianola
Strike up the Band
Stars of Australian Stage & Radio Vol 1
Stars of Australian Stage & Radio Vol 2

Yep! Records
Music Without Compromise

Artists:

Antenna
Jenny Morris
Michal Nicholas
The Lovetones
Saints of India
Screw the Pooch
sounditout
Southend
Spaceniks

Robyn Archer

Robyn Archer AO is a multi-award winning artist whose long career encompasses singing, writing, direction and public advocacy of the arts. An acknowledged exponent of classic European cabaret, Robyn was named Cabaret Icon at the 2016 Adelaide Cabaret Festival, and won the Helpmann Award as Australia’s Best Cabaret Performer 2013.

She has performed throughout the world, from Paris and Berlin to Bogota and Hong Kong, and in London her one-woman show A Star is Torn (celebrating its 40th anniversary in 2019/20) ran for a year in the West End. She has written many successful theatre shows and recorded eleven albums, including many of her own songs, and these will be digitally released on Undercover Music’s Rouseabout Records label. In addition to her performing and writing career, Robyn has a distinguished record in artistic direction of major festivals and other aspects of arts leadership.

“Arguably the greatest cabaret artist in the country”
(Australian Book Review)

“Just when we were wondering what cabaret is any more, along comes Robyn Archer to give us a splendid master class.”
(The Barefoot Review)

"On Archer’s new CD, Classic Cabaret Rarities, she presents examples of European cabaret in three of its heydays. From fin-de-siècle Paris there are the songs of Aristide Bruant; from Germany in the first thirty years of the twentieth century — from expressionism to Weimar — there are songs by Wedekind, Brecht and Friedrich Hollaender; from 1950s Paris, there’s Léo Ferré and Brel. They are intense songs, all of them: angry, tragic, bitingly funny; songs about ideas. They matter to Archer and she makes them matter to me. This is the real thing.”
Andrew Ford for Inside Story

Read more at www.robynarcher.com Robyn is represented by Smartartists

Robyn Archer
Classic Cabaret Rarities
Catalogue Number RRR91

Buy  Buy Buy

Classic Cabaret Rarities

Robyn Archer: Classic Cabaret Rarities is the arts and cabaret icon’s 11th album and her first since Keep Up Your Standards, a 1997 collaboration with Paul Grabowsky.

Robyn’s entire back catalogue will soon be re-released for download and streaming.
The songs here are a selection from the repertoires of two recitals Que Reste-t’Il and Dancing on the Volcano, created by Robyn Archer and performed by Robyn, Michael Morley and George Butrumlis on many and varied stages over the last decade. With a couple of obvious exceptions (Moritat, Falling in Love Again and Ne Me Quitte Pas) the songs themselves are rarely heard and this will be the first recording of most in these translations.

The early French songs (some by Bruant whose poster portrait by Lautrec has become an icon of fin-de siècle cabaret) give us chilling satire and a portrait of Paris quite at odds with today’s romantic cliché. The pre-war German songs similarly paint a different picture of Berlin than that which Archer’s usual repertoire reflects. Her landmark recordings Robyn Archer Sings Brecht Vols 1 and 2 focus on the tough crisis years.

Here, a lighter touch prevails from a period when Germany tried to pretend that war was over. Only the poignant Spoliansky song, and perhaps Hollaender’s Eine Kleine Sehsucht betray the uncertainty beneath and herald the coming horrors.

Apart from the rare repertoire, this recording is evidence of an even rarer musical collaboration. That three artists, with virtually no technological ornamentation, can create so much lively magic, both in live performance and in the studio, is evidence of their exceptional musicianship, scholarly intelligence, brilliant sympatico and long-standing friendship.

Robyn Archer: vocal, ukulele
Michael Morley: piano, vocals
George Butrumlis: accordion, orchestral bass accordion, vocals

Michael Lynch Executive Producer
Recorded, mixed and mastered by Craig Pilkington at Audrey Studios

George Gittoes cover image from his portrait of Robyn Archer. A Pre-War Portrait, 1990 (National Portrait Gallery, Australia)

Musical arrangements evolved within the trio during rehearsals for live performances over several years. The early French songs were initially arranged by John Napier for seven piece ensemble in Archer’s Chat Noir

Album Track Listings

    PARIS 1880s-1890s

  1. The Street
  2. Le Chat Noir
  3. Here Comes The Cholera
  4. Red City
  5. It Takes Cash
  6. Trollope Rondo
  7. Song Of The Rag And Bone Man
  8. Coin ! Coin ! Coin !

    BERLIN 1900s-1930s

  1. Little Song
  2. Anna Luise
  3. The Deep Sigh Of A Lady In A Troubled Night
  4. Granny Murderer
  5. Apfelboeck
  6. Moritat
  7. Seashells From Margate or The Petroleum Song
  8. Kutteldaddeldu
  9. Falling In Love Again
  10. Kitsch Tango
  11. Eine Kleine Sehnsucht
  12. I Know It Can't Be So

    PARIS 1950s

  1. Le Piano Du Pauvre
  2. Monsieur William
  3. Ca Va!
  4. Le Fou Du Roi
  5. I.M. Jacques Brel
  6. Ne Me Quitte Pas
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What the Media have to Say...


“There’s a kind of smoky sensual world weariness to Robyn’s new album. Yet there is also vitality and verve, anger and angst, barbs and bouquets. Archer has lived this music for a long time, yet each time she approaches it, she brings something new. It’s hard to imagine another performer bringing similar guts to this music. Can anyone tire of this music? And what better advocate than that fearless proselytizer, our very own Archer.”
(Vincent Plush 4.5 out of 5, The Weekend Australian)

CABARET: Robyn Archer ★★★★
CLASSIC CABARET RARITIES (Rouseabout)
Had his music not done the job, Aristide Bruant's immortality was assured by Toulouse-Lautrec's posters famously depicting the singer-songwriter in black hat and scarlet scarf.
A third of this album focuses on Paris circa 1880-1900, featuring Bruant's scowling view of a corrupted world. Robyn Archer's English translations reveal chilling parallels with the dark visions of William Blake's Songs of Experience, and the singer revels in material that suits a theatrical delivery spiked with words spat out with superb venom.
The second third comes from Weimar Berlin before Nazism blotted out a sunnier optimism; songs that play to Archer's arch playfulness. Moritat and Falling in Love Again aside, they are less familiar pieces, including the black humour of Frank Wedekind's Granny Murderer and the tender Eine Kleine Sehnsucht.
She closes the circle by returning to Paris, this time in the 1950s: the world of Brel. Archer's singing is expertly supported by Michael Morley (piano, vocals) and George Butrumlis (accordion, bass accordion, vocals). The one quibble is that sometimes she could have essayed a more complete surrender to the wonderment, sensuousness or desolation of these songs.
 (John Shand, Sydney Morning Herald)

The award winning and much loved singer, Robyn Archer, who possesses a multitude of strings to her glittering bow, has been a dynamic and integral part of the international cabaret scene for many years.

On this entertaining collection, which is comprised of a gaggle of intriguing rarities, Archer is joined by Michael Morley (piano and vocals) and George Butrumlis (accordion, orchestral bass accordion and vocals).
The album is divided neatly into three sections: "Paris 1880s-1890s", "Berlin 1900s-1930s" and “Paris 1950s".
One of the most enriching aspects of this album, is the arresting and unexpected insights that some of the songs provide into Paris during the 1880s and 1890s.

Such insights may compel the casual listener to view the city's history, free of the misty eyed idealistic glow, that thoughts of Paris can typically conjure.
For example, "Here Comes the Cholera" fuses a jaunty melody with black humour and provides a rather eye opening glimpse into the impacts of a rampant and flourishing disease during the late Nineteenth Century.
On "Classic Cabaret Rarities" Archer both entertains and educates.
(Graham Blackley, Trad&Now)

“It’s done!  Robyn’s Classic Cabaret Rarities has been added to my playlist and goes to air this coming Friday! This kind of material is History Brought to Life and is the perfect complement to Hills Radio’s The Big Band Era. Many thanks for keeping us in the loop.
Cheers for now…”
(Bill Hodgson, Hills Radio 88.9FM)

“I look forward to having a listen. Robyn's a very interesting and talented woman.”
(Anne McAllister, Celtic Folk, 3CR)