Recently, Domino Records reissued Wyatt’s entire catalog, introducing his work, which sounds as current as it did the day it was recorded, to a new generation of ears. His wit, both sonic and lyrical, is boundless. Wyatt is an international treasure whose work, though highly political, never ceases to function as musical art of the highest order. His latest record, For the Ghosts Within , a collaboration with Ros Stephen and Gilad Atzmon, is his first since 2007’s politically charged Comicopera. His work since that time has been clever, restless, and typically brilliant. In the ’90s, he became something of a hero of underground musicians with the albums Shleep (1997) and Dondestan (Revisited) (1998) receiving rave reviews in publications like The Wire magazine and the sadly now-defunct Popwatch. By the early ’80s, Wyatt had begun recording for the underground label Rough Trade, releasing a series of beautiful singles that reflected a newly found, fervent political awareness. This is a sound that Wyatt has cultivated to this day, one composed of complex blends of pop, jazz, and world music in miniature, a la Brian Wilson’s “pocket symphonies” even, though more immediate and British in their foregrounding of Wyatt’s sophisticated and eccentric sensibility.Ī better comparison might be to the concise, wildly surreal work of arty punk bands like the Swell Maps or The Homosexuals, groups with an obvious debt to Wyatt. While recuperating, he began work on what would become Rock Bottom , a haunting album that relied heavily on keyboards and multitracked vocals as opposed to the full-band workouts of his earlier music. In 1973, Wyatt fell from the fourth-floor window of a friend’s home, becoming paralyzed from the waist down. Involved in every avant-garde of British music since the ’60s-from prog rock to punk and postrock-Wyatt began his career as the drummer and vocalist for the Canterbury band Soft Machine, a seminal prog-rock outfit heavily into jazz time-signatures and modal drift. Like that of the best songwriters, his work is a world unto itself, instantly recognizable, not least of all due to his high, quavering vocals and almost cubist approach to lyrics. Robert Wyatt’s story is as compelling as the endlessly imaginative music that it yielded. Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945–2000by Lucy Raven Zoe Leonard: You see I am here after allby Marc Joseph Bergįrancine Prose's My New American Lifeby Simon Van Booy Hervé Le Tellier's Enough about Love and The Sextine Chapelby Lee Ann Brownĭanzig Baldaev's Drawings from the Gulagby John Reed Sebastián Silvaby Christian Viveros-FaunéĪbandon Normal Instrumentsby Deb Olin Unferthįoxtrot Echo Lima Tango: A Fanzine about Felt & Co.
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