Kitty Empire 

Robert Stillman: Machine’s Song – review

Robert Stillman's third album is a haunting, sometimes elusive soundscape of pre-modern Americana, says Kitty Empire
  
  


In music, you can easily confuse the experimental with the futuristic. The works of Maine native and Canterbury music lecturer Robert Stillman, however, lend an avant-garde shimmer to pre-modern American sounds. "Broadwar" – from his calm, but searching third album – could double as incidental music to a western in which little happens except quietly heroic cow-herding; rattles and whistles of the railway sigh mournfully on "Broadwar Retreat". The sound collages on this strangely affecting record won't be for everyone, but Stillman takes over-familiar totems of Americana – like the brassy ditty at the heart of "Impossible Tree" - and asks you to hear them afresh.

 

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