Orindal

ROBERT STILLMAN- 10,000 Rivers ORD-90

Release date: January 9, 2026

UK/EU record buyers: Please visit kitrecords.com

Multi-instrumentalist and composer Robert Stillman. announces the release of new album 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.

Tracks

  1. 10,000 RIvers (Jobs) (7:53)
  2. Reality Distortion Field (4:01)
  3. The Zentrepreneur (Carrots) (7:28)
  4. Knowledge Is Free! (Woz) (3:42)
  5. If You Knew Him Like I Know Him (Ive) (4:34)
  6. The California Ideology (A Walking Meeting) (6:01)
  7. No Off 06:26)
  8. To Be Loved By You (Kids) (3:30)

    9. Credits

      All music written, arranged, performed, and produced by Robert Stillman.
      Tom Herbert: Fretless electric bass on ‘Jobs’; electric bass guitar on ‘Knowledge is Free’ and ‘No Off’; Acoustic bass on ‘If you knew him like I know him’.
      Sean Carpio- Tambourine and electric bass guitar on ‘Reality Distortion Field’

      Mastered by Matthew Barnhart

      Cover art by James Bridle

      Pressing Information

      Vinyl edition
      400 high quality, 160g, classic black vinyl LPs in extra heavyweight, full color, jackets w/ 3 Risograph-printed lyric inserts. Artwork by James Bridle, design by Richard Greenan. 8 tracks, 43 minutes.

      Vinyl pressed by Smashed Plastic in Chicago, IL.
      Jackets printed by Stoughton Printing in City of Industry, CA.
      Inserts printed by Issue Press in Grand Rapids, MI.

      All vinyl orders include a digital download of the entire album available on the January 9, 2026 release date.

      10,000 Rivers vinyl distributed by The Business & Revolver / Midheaven.