Patrick (2020) unfolds through a drifting sequence of images and sounds that move between portrait, landscape, archive, and atmosphere. Shot on 16mm film, the work lingers over details with a tactile and sensual attention: light falling across interiors, fragments of urban space, ocean water receding into sand, sap leaking from tree bark, objects preserved in archival collections, and traces of queer nightlife embedded within San Francisco’s geography. The film’s sonic texture is equally immersive, layering ambient sound, recorded testimony, and the propulsive electronic music of Patrick Cowley into a structure that feels both documentary and dreamlike.

Gradually, the film assembles a portrait of Cowley, the influential producer, composer, and pioneer of Hi-NRG music whose work shaped the queer club culture of 1970s San Francisco. Emerging from experimental electronic music scenes while simultaneously producing music for discos, nightclubs, and gay pornography, Cowley occupied a position between underground experimentation and popular culture. Fowler approaches this history indirectly, allowing anecdotes from Maurice Tani (friend, former flatmate and sometimes musical collaborator of Patrick Cowley), locations, and material remnants to accumulate rather than constructing a fixed biographical narrative.

Throughout the film, Fowler resists the conventions of linear documentary form. Voice and image drift apart, editing remains visibly handmade, allowing a sense of the artists positionality within the telling to be legible. Moments of cinematic abstraction interrupt historical narration. This fragmented structure reflects broader themes within the work: memory, loss, queer cultural inheritance, and the instability of archives themselves. Patrick Crowley died in 1982 at the height of his experimental and genre pushing practice, after being diagnosed with what came to be known as AIDS. Rather than monumentalising its subject, Patrick evokes a social and artistic world through texture, rhythm, and atmosphere, foregrounding the emotional residue left behind in places, sounds, and images.