10,000 Rivers by Robert Stillman
Inspired in part by Walter Isaacson’s biography of Apple entrepreneur Steve Jobs, Robert Stillman’s 10,000 Rivers comes out just as other significant books—particularly Cory Doctorow’s Enshittificationand Adam Becker’s More Everything Forever—question the motives and methods of would-be tech visionaries.
Perhaps known best by indie-music fans for his touring work in the Smille, a postpunk band featuring members of Radiohead and Sons of Kemet, Stillman is also a contributor to multimedia exhibitions and soundtracks, a lecturer, and a deliberately unpredictable solo artist.
Handling almost all the music on this conceptual album, Stillman frequently comes across as studiously abstract. One track, “The (Z)entrepreneur (Carrots),” is an impressionistic soundscape in which drums quest for a rhythm signal and a saxophone, an instrument Stillman has been playing since he was a preteen, forms more coherent thoughts within a drone of meditation.
Another track, “No Off,” seems as mellow as a Steely Dan ballad, albeit with Stillman singing in a voice much more fragile and much less lugubrious than Donald Fagen’s, and with a pacing that connects its reluctance about powering down to the drifting of Pink Floyd’s “Us and Them.”
Stillman’s voice remains soft and thoughtful on “10,000 Rivers (Jobs),” stepping along a tempo and keyboard sound that could be Soft Cell as reconfigured by a modern bedroom-pop creator. He lets the pop impulse fly freer and louder on “Reality Distortion Field,” which links bursts of jazz to Alan Parsons Project haziness.
Switching viewpoints on “Knowledge Is Free (Woz),” the parenthetical indicating Apple Computers co-founder Stephen Wozniak, Stillman gives that man’s philosophy a piano-driven hint of John Lennon’s dark solo song, “Remember.”
With the final track, “To Be Loved by You (Kids),” Stillman expresses the vulnerability and bereavement felt by Jobs’ children. A dying flight of woodwinds ends his exploration of a previous generation’s technology guru on a note of apprehension about our generation.
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