Robert Stillman - 10,000 Rivers album launch

Robert Stillman is a saxophonist, improviser, and composer. His projects are characterised by a willingness to ask and answer questions about reality, and his relationship to it, as well as by a radical commitment to spontaneity and process.

He has been heavily influenced by regular collaboration over the past five years with Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood, and Tom Skinner as a touring solo support for and performing member of The Smile, as well as in projects led by Skinner, Dave Okumu, and co-led with Sean Carpio and Anders Holst, among others.

In addition to 12 records under his own name, he has also created work for installation and various media, has curated the ‘Oscillate’ collection of artist lecture performances/essays in collaboration with the Turner Museum, Margate, and contributed to film score recordings by Adem Ilhan, Daniel Pemberton, Jonny Greenwood, and Thom Yorke.

Originally from Maine, USA, Stillman has played saxophone since the age of 11, and his teachers have included George Garzone, George Russell, and Danilo Perez. Based in the UK since 2007, he makes music from his studio based in Margate, UK, and lectures in Music at Canterbury Christ Church University.

Multi-instrumentalist and composer Robert Stillman set to release 10,000 Rivers - a speculative suite of jazz, ambient and smooth pop-inspired compositions that challenge the myths of Silicon Valley’s early ‘90s techno-utopianism.

Robert Stillman didn’t set out to make a concept album about Steve Jobs. But as a composer and improviser whose music asks questions about his relationship with reality, a curiosity about the promises and follies of technology took him there.

Following an intuitive path from James Bridle’s acclaimed book on non-human intelligence Ways of Being to the seminal 1995 essay “The California Ideology”, Stillman arrived at Walter Isaacson’s biography of Apple founder Steve Jobs – and what would become the catalyst for his new album.

“10,000 Rivers points to an alternative narrative about a man who is tormented by the instability of his reality, so tries to invent his way out of it,” Stillman explains. “Ultimately, his tech designs become expressions of his will to replace the messy, disordered, temporary nature of the world with something that strives to be barely physical: streamlined, symmetrical, uncomplicated, and deathless.”

Highly original, wholly unclassifiable, 10,000 Rivers is part cultural critique, part sonic biography and takes the form of a series of songs, instrumentals and abstract soundscapes that respond directly to moments or paradigms from Jobs’ life.

Stylistically, it leans on Stillman’s relationship with the smooth music of Billy Ocean, Gloria Estefan and 10cc from the ‘80s and early ‘90s, made at what he calls “the knife’s edge between the human and the digital.”

“A lot of this music, coincidentally, was contemporary with Jobs’ heyday and the mainstream adoption of his first personal computers,” Stillman continues, revelling in the playful deconstruction of their aspirational and anodyne qualities.

Twinkling, synthetic arpeggios sit alongside tumbledown acoustic improvisation – think Mort Garson meets Moondog – fragments of ambient sound collapse into queasy auto-tuned lullabies, the melancholy paradise of Brian Wilson-esque California dreaming dismantled into uncanny free jazz freakouts.

Recorded to ½-inch 8 track tape and mixed down in real-time to give it a live, performative quality, the result is a speculative, genreless soundtrack to a man’s life and the wider societal values it came to define.

Drawing on his recent collaborations with Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood and Tom Skinner as touring support and live band-member for The Smile, Stillman’s work has long resisted categorisation, and been presented in a range of media, including installations, performance lectures and 12 solo albums, the most recent of which What Does It Mean to Be American? takes a similarly conceptual scalpel to complex notions of US identity.

One of Stillman’s most ambitious and idiosyncratic projects to date, 10,000 Rivers is an elegy for the hubris of a humankind trying to design its way to immortality as it falls apart at the seams.

Videos: 

“Reality Distortion Field” (Lead single from 10,000 Rivers)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=piKLfEvojb0&feature=youtu.be

“Instant Psalm” (Robert Stillman Remix) 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbYQIa0dhxE

“It’s All Is” (From “What Does it Mean to be American?”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5y-NHZ2NDBU&t=12s

Unseen forces documentary: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i55xqtS8pbk

RS Solo Live at Montreux 2023

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=128&v=ip1APPF2bJA&embeds_referring_euri=https%3A%2F%2Frobertstillman.com%2F&embeds_referring_origin=https%3A%2F%2Frobertstillman.com&source_ve_path=MjM4NTE

Social: 

Instagram: @robertstillman_

Twitter: @robert_stillman

Facebook: @robertstillmanmusic