Invisible Patterns

Invisible Patterns is a side project featuring members of Elk City and Versus helmed by guitarist Chris Robertson.

The morning after the 2016 election Chris quickly wrote out all the lyrics for a new song. He had never written about politics before and put them aside for the moment. A week later, he was inspired to write music for them. After singing the finished composition at the piano, Robertson decided to record it immediately, laying down all the instrumental tracks and vocals at home.

“At this point I felt pretty good about the song, Chris says. “It wasn’t taking potshots at Trump. That would be too easy and predictable. Instead this was looking at the things the administration dragged out from underneath. The things, as a New Yorker, I don’t readily encounter. It’s important to know how half this nation thinks and feels.”

Robertson felt the writing and recording had been great therapy but was uncomfortable sharing the song with others. He sat on it for more than a year before playing it for his bandmates in Elk City, Ray Ketchem, Renée LoBue and Richard Baluyut. After hearing it, they urged him to release the song and offered to help him finish it.

Ketchem took Chris’ home recordings to his Magic Door Recording studio in Montclair and added drums, backing vocals by Lobue and a dub-inspired bass line by Baluyut. Ray mixed the track in the Fall of 2018 and Robertson was thrilled with the end results.

Then, inspired by some films he’d been scoring, Chris decided to shoot a video. He purposefully avoided political imagery, choosing visuals that conveyed the mood of the lyrics abstractly.

Chris Robertson is a guitarist, vocalist, and film score composer. He has composed scores for HBO, Grey Advertising, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, and T-time Productions among others.

He has performed with and been a member of outfits like Feed (a Psychedelic Furs’ side project), Punch Havana, the duo of former Bongos’ Richard Barone & James Mastro, and Elk City.

He is currently writing songs for Elk City’s next album which will be released on Bar None Records sometime in 2019 and plans to do further recording with Invisible Patterns as well.