Caravan Collective Christmas Pop-Up w/ Pete Spara - 30th November 2025

Cold Blow 05.12.25

https://archaicfuturerecordings.bandcamp.com/album/10000-rivers

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. 

10,000 Rivers (Jobs)

A one hour excerpt of Pete & Jam "J" all nighter at Koistinen, an atmospheric cocktail bar in Helsinki's legendary Siltanen.

Tracklist:
Konk - Your Life
Kamazu - Indaba Kabani
Talking Heads - Making Flippy Floppy
Push/Pull - Bang The Drums
Congress - 40 Miles (1991 Instrumental)
Kornél Kovács - Szikra
Chaos in the CBD - DeLorean Dreams
COEO - Habibi Dub
Felix - Tiger Stripes
Benedek - Better Days
DMX Krew - Slam Your Body
Cultural Vibe - Power (Power Dub I)
Mory Kanté - Yeke Yeke
Sex Shop Boys - 69 (SixtyNine-Blow Mix)
Chez Damier - I Never Knew Love (Made In Detroit Mix)

Pete Spara B2B Jam "J" @ Koistinen, Helsinki [8/6/24]

Merry Christmas from the SWIMS team. Here is a mix to soundtrack your peaceful moments at home. The tracklist which consists of SWIMS and Kit Records releases is available for a free download at SWIMS Bandcamp. 

https://swims.bandcamp.com/album/swims-christmas-garland-free-dl

Otto Taimela - The Small Things
Akhira Sano - Visionary
Kelpe - Weightless Slowness
Norio - Visions
Phil Smith - Brucke
Time Binding Ensemble - Nychthemera in C# Major 
Earth Mother Spectral Pilot - Eclipse
soo:k - The Drift Of The World
Otto Taimela - Escape Plan
Electric Capablanca - Zugzwang
Norio - Enenra