Robert Stillman – 10,000 Rivers (Orindal Records) (13th Floor Album Review)
If, like me, your brain is yet to kick fully into gear after the summer break then it’s in for a rude awakening when you encounter Robert Stillman’s 10,000 Rivers.
Stillman’s work is never straightforward or mainstream and he uses all of his many talents as a multi-instrumentalist, composer and music researcher and lecturer at Canterbury Christ Church University in the UK to create soundscapes that challenge traditional concepts of songwriting and music-making.
On 10,000 Rivers he leans into the improvisation and exploration of jazz fusing it artfully with pop music sounds of the 1970s and 80s, then envelops it all in a background of orchestration and contemporary classical music.
This is not mindless, mundane music.
Stillman describes the recording as an accidental concept album musing on the life of Steve Jobs, the guy who made Apple cool, after a voyage of discovery on the meanings of non-human intelligence and the drivers of Silicon Valley through various readings which led to the Walter Isaacson biography of Jobs, the catalyst for this 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 says in the release notes. “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.”
That statement alone should snap the cerebral cortexes to attention, focus the vision and prick up your ears!
The record opens softly with 10,000 Rivers (Jobs), simple chords on an electric piano that resurrects the pop feels of Gilbert O’Sullivan. Stillman’s reedy voice wavers on a two note melody that alternates between elevation finishing the first phrase to settling at the verse end delivering erudite commentary on Jobs’ being – You felt opposed to those you saw around you in your life, To all their souls you felt apart, How could you know that they’d become your fodder, When you whispered Into their slumbers?
Tom Herbert adds some liquid sonorous dimension with a fretless bass before the track peters out in hazy jumble of arpeggios, Stillman’s voice and ambient noise.
On Knowledge Is Free (Woz) Stillman borrows ELO’s rhythmic one-note piano riff with underlying click track drum, quickly breaking into a jazzy change of time signature and musical discipline. The track continues to oscilate schizophrenically between ordered and free. Free Knowledge is free, Who am I to decide, Where this magic resides? Stillman sings, alluding to Jobs’ creation of a tool so powerful as to contain all of human experience in the palm of a hand.
Elsewhere the music is the message with 2 of the 8 tracks being instrumental, but, nonetheless, part of the narrative.
The Zentrepreneur (Carrots), for example, evokes the ‘many little instruments’ music of The Art Ensemble of Chicago and, in particular, Lester Bowie’s meandering trumpet describing ‘the messy, disordered, temporary nature of the world’ that Jobs seeks to replace.
While The California Ideology (A Walking Meeting) sounds like a futuristic, repetitively calm background track to a documentary on web technology.
Penultimate track No Off is a soporific, sultry, soulful number that feels weightless and enlightened, a place where the mind can exist outside of the body, in the cloud. No off, Exist in perpetuity, No flesh, Just mind, Residing in a cloud Stillman croons.
This ambitious and challenging album finishes with To Be Loved by You (Kids), that starts with simple arpeggios (again) on a piano with that thin, piercing Stillman voice – And if I found the door to your heart, And I was sure the heart was there, too, Maybe then I’d know what it means, To be loved by you.
With just a hint of woodwind entering after a time, the song remains a simple and elegant lament to a person who was lost among the chaos, who attempted to create order within it, but, ultimately disappears in the noise of his own creation.
10,000 Rivers is not for everybody, but it should definitely be given a chance. It’s thoughtful, challenging and difficult, but it’s also musical, playful and serene.
Alex Robertson
Out January 9th on Orindal Records, pre-order 10,000 Rivers
