Robert Stillman : 10,000 Rivers
The breadth of Robert Stillman’s music is nearly impossible to glean on a first impression. Certainly not through something as gentle and restrained as the opening tones of the leadoff title track on his latest album, 10,000 Rivers. It pulses on sedate waves of keyboard, evoking ’70s pop balladry and a more analog permutation of the softer side of Dan Snaith’s Caribou project, a comparison that holds added weight given Stillman’s similarly warm yet understated vocal style. It’s not until over five minutes into the sprawling ballad that the British artist begins to rewrite the rules of physics governing the song, loops of synthesizer beginning to overlap and envelop each other into an abstract collage.
An artist with a background in folk and jazz alike, Stillman’s resume includes two decades’ worth of recordings and collaborations with artists such as Luke Temple and The Smile—the latter of which seems even more logical given the band’s drummer, Tom Skinner, likewise is a leading light in contemporary jazz. With 10,000 Rivers, he bridges the disparate but complementary elements of his sound into a sprawling yet cohesive set of songs that comprise everything from ambient jazz abstraction to lushly arranged chamber pop, with its common threads being a playfully unconventional approach to composition and gorgeously imaginative arrangements. That and Stillman’s own instrumental proficiency, as he performed nearly everything on the album, save for a handful of bass tracks and some tambourine.
Much as the album’s title track seems to suggest a collapsing of reality, the conceit behind 10,000 Rivers is a narrative of a technological innovator employing his own creations as a means of making sense of the world. It’s inspired in part by Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, and as such draws heavily from the sounds of artists whose moment coincided with Jobs’ own; Stillman cites 10cc, Billy Ocean and Gloria Estefan, to name a handful. And it’s easy to hear a heavy dose of Lennon and Lynne on the bouncy “Knowledge Is Free! (Woz)” for that matter, but on some of the album’s more thrilling moments, Stillman draws on his jazz bona fides, balancing melody with collapsing-sidewalk improvisation on “If You Knew Him Like I Know Him (Ive)” or tapping into the electric weirdness of ’70s-era Miles Davis on “The Zentrepreneur (Carrots)”.
It’s when all of these elements collide that 10,000 Rivers hits its most climactic highs, embracing the swirl of Sufjan Stevens-like art-pop richness on “Reality Distortion Field,” slowly unfolding an ambient pop dirge on the gorgeous “No Off,” and employing repetition in the pursuit of a minimalist slow-build on the hypnotic “The California Ideology (A Walking Meeting)”. Stillman’s universe is a fascinating and open-ended one, constantly expanding.
Label: Orindal
Year: 2025
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