Kahlil Joseph

Fly Paper is the soundtrack to the 2017 film installation by Kahlil Joseph, the filmmaker born in 1981. His music films for some of the most visible names in contemporary black music have moved freely between pop culture and the gallery. The film starts from Joseph's admiration for the photographer Roy DeCarava, who pictured jazz musicians and everyday life in Harlem, and follows a dreamlike path through the neighbourhood's streets. It is also a personal reckoning: Joseph has family ties to Harlem and cared for his late father there at the end of his life. Texts by Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston run through it, and the exhibition notes called it a polyphonic portrait of black art and culture in New York. Commissioned by The Store X and The Vinyl Factory, it premiered at the New Museum in New York in 2017. It then moved to The Store X in Berlin and to London, in Strange Days: Memories of the Future at 180 The Strand, before reaching MOCA in Los Angeles in February 2019.

The record gathers eleven tracks. The original music comes from, among others, Kelsey Lu, Alice Smith, Thundercat, Flying Lotus and Kelan Phil Cohran with Legacy, joined by additional soundscapes and music by James William Blades. VF's announcement described the soundtrack as knitting that original music together with the film's literary texts and Blades's atmospheres, so the record follows the film's sound world rather than collecting separate singles. Side A opens with I Put A Spell On You, moves through Reached Home and At The End Of It All, and ends on Had A Love. Side B begins with Moods, passes through Played Bach Out Of Tune, Harlem Is My Heart and Suspended Animation, and closes on Memories and Mystics. In the London show the sound was brought to the fore on a bespoke system, and The Vinyl Factory wrote that it immersed and unsettled visitors in equal measure. The exhibition notes put it plainly: the film moves beyond the visible by expanding Joseph's practice into sound, a complex acoustic environment where sonic textures and original compositions resonate. On the record that environment stands without the pictures, and what remains is a sequence about memory and reverie in Harlem, told through songs, voices and the space between them.

Single LP on 180g coloured vinyl, limited to 1000 copies, in a gatefold sleeve and full-colour inner sleeve screen printed on a soft matt laminate. The package sits in a bespoke screen-printed PVC sleeve and was designed by Osk in Los Angeles.