Robert Wyatt

condition (record/cover): NM / VG+ (light ring wear)

Red vinyl. No book.

A limited-edition Italian 7" issued by the Stampa Alternativa publishing house (catalog SCONC.002), packaged together with a book in the publisher's distinctive small-format paperback series. Chairman Mao is Robert Wyatt's setting of a Mao Zedong poem (in English translation), recorded as part of a wider Italian cultural project that paired political/poetic texts with sympathetic musical recordings.

The piece is short and minimal: Wyatt's voice multi-tracked against spare keyboard accompaniment, the entire texture maybe two minutes long, with the lyric translating Mao's verse into Wyatt's characteristic falsetto-and-tenor vocal arrangement. The Italian Stampa Alternativa publishing house had been issuing politically engaged small-format books, pamphlets and limited-edition records since the 1970s, with a particular focus on third-world solidarity, counterculture material and historical political texts; the Chairman Mao 7" sits within that broader cultural project rather than alongside Wyatt's other commercial 7" releases.

The original vintage Stampa Alternativa Italian pressing on SCONC.002, with the accompanying booklet/text in Italian. A scarce and rarely-encountered item even among committed Wyatt collectors, more often found in book-collection contexts than in record-store ones.