Some albums are recorded in a studio. Some are recorded live. Singer-songwriter Archer recorded his new album on the banks of the placid Murray River, playing from sundown to sunup with a backing orchestra of cicadas.
“I think it sounds okay,” Archer says of his record. “I like to record at night. What do they say? Night time is the right time.” In The Divine Church of the Open Sky, Volume 2, Archer recorded on the shore of Bullarook Creek, Victoria, as the waters rose to full flood. Now, he’s following up with The Divine Church of the Open Sky, Volume 1 – no, that’s not a typo – a tragic, soulful folk record with a sound so sparse that it makes Johnny Cash seem over-processed. Specialist sound engineer Alex Bennett was on hand to manage the unique night of recording.
“Field recordings are a thing of the deep past, completely out of fashion as far as singer-songwriters are concerned,” Martin Martini, director of Pound Records writes. “No one is recording outside anymore. Because Archer’s songs are unquestionably connected to land and country, recording his music under the stars, and amongst the trees, allows the songs the breathing space they deserve.”
Archer recently quit his job on a spud farm to take Volume 1 on the road. He’ll be walking and hitching his way across three states, stopping by railway stations, nursing homes, golf clubs and Melbourne’s Wesley Anne along the way. Archer hopes to make all his concert dates on time, but, as they say: man plans and God laughs.
“I’ve allowed a lot of time, given that I have spent a lot of time not getting rides before – could you believe?” Archer says of his endeavour. “I might sing a song to a yellow-tailed black cockatoo, if they wanted to listen. We’re going to be going to some schools and lobbing up on the street wherever we feel like it, and playing somewhere, playing somewhere on the street. Maybe saying a poem to a rock, or asking a lizard’s advice on sun tanning.”
In spite of his playfully elliptical pronouncements and St. Francis of Assisi lifestyle, Archer exudes a kind of down-to-earthness not easily conveyed through text. His inscrutable and yet ultra-plain style has put him onstage with Marlon Williams and Calexico, and fuelled a connect-the-dots journey of blues, jazz and folk festivals across Australia and Canada.
Aside from getting the Volume 1 tour sorted, Archer says that the biggest challenge he’s currently facing is the recent disappearance of his brain. “I don’t know how it happened,” he says. “It just disappeared. I think that can happen sometimes, like a spontaneous brain combustion. It’s made things easier in some ways and more difficult in others. Like everything, isn’t it?”
The Divine Church of the Open Sky, Volume 1 will be followed up with Volume 3, to be recorded at an unidentified dry riverbed in the southern outback. Archer says recording will begin “tomorrow,” though only a dogmatist would insist on interpreting this literally. “It’s happening right now,” he explains of the recording of Volume 3. “Like, almost as we speak. It’s going on in the dry country. But, there is rain in the dry country.”
Archer prefers touring on foot not just because it keeps him closer to nature, but because of a general queasiness about the sustainability of the internal combustion engine. Melbourne’s public transport system – Myki’s and all – has won the city a few points with Archer.
“Melbourne’s gone through a lot of big changes in the last few hundred years,” he says. “I think the ants are getting along with it and doing okay with the crumbs that are presented before them. The people are beautiful. The people are beautiful and wonderful.”
As Volume 3 is brewing, Archer has been working to expand his musical palate, mixing old phonograph recordings with Hindustani classical music and the ambient cries of the banks’ black cockatoo.
“I think everyone’s born into music,” Archer says. “It’s everywhere. I always liked to sing when I was young. It’s always in all of us. Even if you were to say that you didn’t know what music was. There is music in the truck crash.”
