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Robert Wyatt guests on new Mary Halvorson album

The UK artist appears on three tracks on the US guitarist’s second Code Girl
release

Guitarist Mary Halvorson has been a long time admirer of Robert Wyatt’s music. She opened her 2018 Wire playlist with his “Sea Song”, saying: “I’m starting with Robert Wyatt because his influence probably runs deepest. He is a true individual and innovator and I’ve spent years with many of his albums on repeat listen.”

Now she has enticed the singer, who announced that he was stopping making music in 2014, out of retirement to sing on three tracks on Artlessly Falling, the second album by her Code Girl group.

“Robert is one of my heroes,” says Halvorson. “It’s such a big deal to me that he was open to singing on this record, because his music has been an enormous influence on Code Girl, and just about everything else I’ve done. I wrote the three tracks he sings on specifically for him, and I was floored by the grace and brilliance with which he approached this music. It was a dream come true.”

Since announcing his retirement, Wyatt has reappeared intermittently, playing cornet or trumpet on albums by David Gilmour and Paul Weller, while in 2018 he contributed vocals to Janek Schaefer’s Wyatt-inspired album What Light There Is Tells Us Nothing. But his appearance on Artlessly Falling represents his most significant return to music making, and coincides with the publication of the book Side By Side, a collaboration with his wife the visual artist Alfreda Benge, and the Domino label’s release of the 2004 compilation His Greatest Misses, which is being issued on vinyl for the first time.

Artlessly Falling is released by the Firehouse 12 label on 16 October, and also features Halvorson’s regular Code Girl collaborators vocalist Amirtha Kidambi, bass player Michael Formanek and drummer Tomas Fujiwara, as well as trumpeter Adam O’Farrill and saxophonist María Grand.