Stillman, Robert

Stillman, Robert

10,000 Rivers

Orindal

***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.”

Stillman, Robert

Something About Living

Orindal

***Something About Living is an album of live recordings by experimental jazz composer/multi-instrumentalist Robert Stillman. The music was captured over the course of Stillman’s time as the solo support act for The Smile (Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood, Tom Skinner). The album weaves excerpts from various theater and arena shows along the tour’s North American routing into a seamless whole, creating a 40-minute program that represents an expanded version of Stillman’s ever-transforming live set. Something About Living is the product of a steady, on-stage evolution that happened over the course of the nearly 60 shows opening for the Smile across the EU, UK, US, Canada and Mexico. However, the creative origins of the set began in relative isolation during the pandemic, through Stillman’s work on projects like his multi-media installation Unseen Forces and his monthly broadcast for Margate Radio, both of which drew upon solo improvisation using saxophone, cassettes, Yamaha DX7 synthesizer, and effects.