Album Notes

Portland busy-boy Chris Robley (the "Stephen King of Indie-Pop") has previously released 2 critically lauded solo albums, "this is the" and "the drunken dance of modern man in love," both produced by Adam Selzer (M. Ward, The Decemberists, Laura Gibson). His third, "Movie Theatre Haiku" was produced with the help of Portland audio-fiends Mike Coykendall, Jeff Stuart Saltzman, and Rob Stroup.

The album upholds Robley's reputation for writing story-songs about characters that find themselves in heartbreak and despair. But "Movie Theatre Haiku" also finds him taking his trademark blend of fractured folk and dark, psychedelic indie-pop into more ambitious orchestral and electronic territory.

"[It is an] album about measuring distances in an over-stimulated world where all our standard compasses have gone spinning out of control. Distances between old lovers, between the living and the dead, between your ambitions and your limitations, between the world you wish for and the world that is, between a performer and audience, between God and mankind, between here and home," explains Robley.

"Traditionally, a haiku poem would be a tiny, seemingly insignificant observation about the natural world that unfolds into an epiphany concerning the larger mysteries of life," he continues. "I thought it was a funny notion to put a poet in an environment like a movie theatre that demands nothing of his imagination, that forces its own hyperactive images and observations onto him, and then ask him to write a haiku, one that would most likely begin with a wide angle on the world and shrink, in the end, to something constricted and banal.

"The characters in each of the songs on 'Movie Theatre Haiku¹ are lost in this kind of confined space, fumbling in the darkness to feel the four walls closing in on them. They must measure distances in a shrinking world, and find a way out."

Touring often, Robley performs his eclectic and hyper-literate psych-folk-indie-pop compositions with backing band The Fear of Heights, a sheets-of-sound arkestra of doom that swings and swells in size from 4 to 11 members including horns, flutes, and strings.

He also fronts the agit-prop-prog-pop outfit THE SORT OFs whose much praised 2006 debut "Anxiety on Parade" detailed the human waste of the post-modern political landscape.

In his spare time he's been known to fill the role of multi-instrumentalist with The Imprints, Norfolk & Western, and Rachel Taylor Brown. He's also appeared as a session player on over a dozen releases and recently produced Little Beirut's sophomore effort "High Dive". He enjoys full contact banking, circuit bending, and watching Battlestar Galactica with his wife Kristiana. Much to their dismay, their cat Fellini is a big fan of Jason Mraz.