"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." 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." 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. 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.