Experimental in the purest sense. That’s how the liner notes describe What Does It Mean to Be American?, the latest record from US-born, UK-based multi-instrumentalist Robert Stillman. Released via Orindal Records, the album takes the improvisational techniques of Stillman’s previous work and embraces them more fully, aiming to eliminate conscious decision-making and reduce the space between feeling and creating. Jazz, drone, chamber pop, funk… the touchstones are almost too numerous to count, and what emerges evades genre labels by its sheer diversity. A collision of ideas and influences gathered from as far and wide as possible and directed toward a single, open-ended question. What does it mean to be American?
“I was born and raised in America, and identify as an American,” Robert Stillman explains. “However, I have lived in the UK for over a decade, and this has given me the opportunity to consider what being ‘American’ means outside the day-to-day experience of being American and has created a space for me to consider the concept of American ‘identity’ as someone no longer living there.” The ability to contemplate from such a vantage, together with Stillman’s eclectic vision, allows for a comprehensive examination of this identity. American shorn of its stereotypes and sentimental simplicity. American with its shadows and shames left intact. “It is tempting to claim one’s favourite trappings of ‘American’ and disassociate from the rest,” Stillman says, “but this is unacceptable to me.”
The album is therefore not just an attempt to answer the question of the title, but a rebuttal of other such answers. Or rather the gradual realisation that in order to truly answer the question, the flimsy alternatives that have been previously offered must first be confronted. The intuitive nature of Stillman’s music is an inherent part of this process. A way to bypass the clouding power of historic justification. To short-circuit the reflexive mechanisms of self-defence. The record sees him reach for anything and everything which feels relevant within the moment of asking—from the sombre piano-led opener ‘Cherry Ocean’ to the carefree jazzy swing of ‘It’s All Is,’ the disorientation of ‘Deep Time, U.S.A.’ to the haunted, faraway sound of ‘Acceptance Blues.’ As Stillman continues:
In this record I wish to share my insight that to ‘be’ American is to claim everything within that specification: historical, cultural, social, stereotypical, experiential, heroic, villainous. In this model of Americanness, there is nothing ‘American’ that lives outside of the ‘American’ identity. In the context of some of the most difficult, embarrassing, uncomfortable years of being American, I feel that doubling down on the identity in total represents a gesture of radical acceptance of reality that opens the space for positive action, be it personal or political, as a corrective to the inertia of denial and delusion.
Alongside the new record, Orindal and KIT are also releasing a remaster of Stillman’s 2017 album, Portals, as a limited edition LP. Aside from its continued popularity (the release is the most repressed cassette in Orindal’s eleven year history), the timing feels appropriate as Portals offers an interesting companion piece to What Does It Mean to Be American? Consisting almost entirely of multi-tracked Fender Rhodes electric piano, the songs display the same sense of improvisation but within far narrower constraints, and the relatively minimalist, repetitive style stands apart from the fluid experimentation of What Does It Mean… As though the album is spoken in one language, rather than the countless dialects of its successor.
The songs of Portals are intended to “encourage a state of ‘no-mind’ in the listener,” as Stillman puts it, “acting as a gateway out of thoughts and into the present moment.” However, the release should be viewed not as the polar opposite of What Does It Mean to Be American?, but its precursor. The groundwork necessary to foster conditions capable of tackling the themes of the new record. The state of ‘no-mind’ might read like an exercise in escape or forgetting, but Stillman reveals its value in personal discovery. One which holds immediacy as a kind of acceptance, and acceptance as a kind of reckoning.
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What Does It Mean to Be American? and Portals are out now via Orindal Records (USA) and KIT Records (UK), and you can get them from the Robert Stillman Bandcamp page.
