Artist	Song
Robert Wyatt [Mid-Eighties]	Alfie and Robert Sail Off Into the Sunset (1:42)
Robert Wyatt [Rock Bottom]	Alifib/Alife (13:30)
Robert Wyatt [Dondestan (Revisited)]	Left On Man (3:34)
Robert Wyatt [Ruth Is Stranger Than Richard]	Team Spirit (8:28)
Robert Wyatt [Theatre Royal Drury Lane]	Memories [live] (3:17)
Robert Wyatt [Solarflares Burn For You]	We Got An Arts Council Grant (1:39)
Robert Wyatt [Shleep]	Maryan (6:11)
Robert Wyatt [Mid-Eighties]	Alliance (4:27)
Robert Wyatt [Shleep]	The Duchess (4:19)
Robert Wyatt [Ruth Is Stranger Than Richard]	Song for Che (3:42)
Robert Wyatt [Rock Bottom]	A Last Straw (5:47)
Soft Machine [Out-Bloody-Rageous: An Anthology]	As Long As He Lies Perfectly Still (2:38)
Björk (feat. Robert Wyatt) [Medúlla]	Submarine (3:13)
Robert Wyatt [Mid-Eighties]	Amber And The Amberines (4:13)
Robert Wyatt [Theatre Royal Drury Lane]	Calyx [live] (3:10)
Robert Wyatt [Cuckooland]	Forest (7:58)
Robert Wyatt [Solarflares Burn For You]	Fol De Rol (1:52)

Comment:

Easily the most obscure artist I've as yet constructed a single-artist mix of, Robert Wyatt is also, rather unarguably I think, the most versatile.

Listen to "As Long As He Lies Perfectly Still", the earliest track in this compilation, from original Wyatt band Soft Machine's Volume Two album, and marvel at the absolute effortlessness with which he navigates the swooping vocals, let alone the drumming, of this resolutely 7/4 hippie rock song; then hear the Björk collaboration "Submarine", the most recent track here (and probably the highest profile Mr. Wyatt's gotten for his music in decades), in which several Roberts, some of them mumbling beautifully like elf-turned forest creatures, are layered into a purely acapella ambient soundscape.

In between, you have a picture of an artist doing pretty much exactly what he wants.

... He doesn't ever show it off, though; it's easy to miss, but Wyatt can write, sing and arrange rock, jazz, folk, electronica, unclassifiable, anywhere in between. His voice is deceiving: at times it seems like the most laid-back voice imaginable, not even bothering to put jazz stylings where they should seemingly rightfully go, but he never misses a note in the most complicated, classical-worthy structures; and then, it turns out that it's at just those times when that architecture is the song's most important structural element (as in "We Got An Arts Council Grant", sung hilariously by a veritable chorus of Wyatts).

If Robert Wyatt isn't prog, nobody ever was; he's a fearless adventurer, but never sacrifices an ounce of emotional content, and as such substantiates all the hope prog ever had. Listen to "The Duchess", with its 4/4 melody set against a 3/4 ostinato, Wyatt's notes precise as ever while his words are as casual and halting as someone who continually needs to remind himself to keep a secret, which is after all what the song is about; or the political satire "Team Spirit", with one of the most brilliant sets of lyrics I've ever heard ("Beating shit out of me takes the hell out of you") and a melody so catchy it could be a single even at over 8 minutes.

In the epic "Forest", with its refrain of "while the Gypsy girl sings", Wyatt brilliantly subverts "rock music"'s romanticization of Gypsies, ending up with a still impossibly poignant song about, what else, the exploitation of the Rroma. THE MAN CAN DO EVERYTHING. His corpus of lyrics is simultaneously pointed as Ochs, poetic as Waits, bizarre as Eno (who, by the way, plays "direct inject anti-jazz ray gun" on "Team Spirit"), often in the same phrase, the same *word*. A Robert Wyatt with as much released material as, say, Neil Young would be my favorite musical artist without question, and I submit that his tenure in Soft Machine should be looked on the same as Young's in Buffalo Springfield: enough for musical sensory overload, but with only a fraction of the true spirit of the man coming through; the solo material is the real meat here.

I've intentionally not duplicated material from the official 17-track Wyatt best-of collection "His Greatest Misses", and also somewhat modeled my mix after it (pleased to note the identity in number of tracks as well). Wyatt tracks tend to run into each other on the albums, so nearly all of these are edited: "We Got An Arts Council Grant" even contains a snatch of the following song on Solarflares Burn For You, "Righteous Rhumba", without which I submit that it doesn't really sound complete.

... Looking over artofthemix, I suppose this is the 7th single-artist RW mix, four of which are twgs's "Robert Wyatt Rarities"; having already rejected, for the purposes of mix coherency and space limitations, unbelievable Wyatt tracks like "Blues in Bob Minor", "Insensatez", "'Round Midnight", "Shrinkrap", "Muddy Mouse (c) / Muddy Mouth", "Moon in June", "Dondestan", you can be sure I'll be investigating them-all mixes in times to come.

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