“I tend to see skateboarding as almost a kind of dance, a conversation with the terrain around you,” says J. Joseph in the documentary Fly, a silent film about skateboarding in New Haven that has inspired a new local album.
The skateboard, meanwhile, “starts to feel like an extension of self.” He describes how, as he has gotten better at skating, he has developed spiritual connections, to himself, the board, and the ground around him. He has learned, in effect, to work with gravity instead of fighting it.
If he does it right, he said, “the board just kind of flows with you.” And “I find this resonating with me spiritually because you’re tapping into the force of gravity — the force that’s created by this planet, that grounds you to this planet — to create this temporary sensation of flight.… And that’s the most amazing thing to me, that this simple machine allows you to tap into the natural forces of the earth and, for just a second, fly.”
That sense of floating pervades Fly. The film itself has floated around New Haven since it was made a few years ago, and now has created a new album through New Haven-based musician Ionne — a.k.a. Maurice Harris — who saw the film a couple years ago, let it get a hold of him, and let the music come out of him.
Harris started working on the album shortly after seeing Fly in the fall of 2021. “I kept coming back to it, and coming back to it,” he said — and released it this month.
Fly began as a project of Second Floor Hardware School, a collaboration between artists Kulimushi Barongozi and Jisu Sheen. “Me and Jisu formed an artists’ group” like the way musicians form a band, Barongozi said. The initial idea was to open up a storefront, but “we didn’t have the resources to open anything physical.” Instead, “we kept doing stuff. The main part of it was putting on shows,” featuring visual art and performances by New Haven-area artists and musicians. “Anything we release, we count it as a show.”
The duo approached the now-departed Artspace to create a project in conjunction with an event in 2021 at the temporary skate bowl Artspace constructed with support from the Yale Schwarzman Center: a film that could be playing while people were skating to enhance the experience. At the time, “we were doing all kinds of different art shows and that was part of it,” Barongozi said.
Artspace liked the duo’s idea and gave them $500 to make it. They decided on filming interviews with three skaters in town — Malachi, a young man learning how to skate; Indigaux, a musician a few years into skating already; and J. Joseph, an established skater who also helped organize the creation of the skate bowl — and using those interviews as the backbone for a film to “celebrate skate culture from different perspectives,” Barongozi said. They passed along some of the funds to their interviewees. “We wanted all different kinds of skaters.”
They approached Malachi because “we wanted a kid” and having met him at the skate park in Scantlebury Park, “thought he would be perfect.” Malachi had been a regular at the park since it opened and “was one of the people who cut the ribbon” at its official inauguration. “We asked his mom” if Malachi could participate, and his mom agreed.
They knew Indigaux from the New Haven arts scene. Sheen knew that they skated and were “always down to do creative stuff.” And J. Joseph was a fixture in New Haven’s skating circles, having been one of the people instrumental in opening Scantlebury’s skate park in the first place, in 2020. “He had to go through a long process,” and “he was proud of the thing he was building and wanted to talk about it.”
Arranging the interviews in the film from Malachi to Joseph allowed for the unfolding of “a gradual understanding, from a kid to a master,” Barongozi said.
“It was a good motivation to include other people” in artmaking, Barongozi said. It also satisfied their own desire for collaboration. Barongozi is “mostly a painter” and “one of the big tragedies” of painting, they said, “is that it gets lonely.” The film, Barongozi and Sheen thought, “would be a really cool collaboration,” and also let them “get outside.”
“We don’t make a lot of films,” Barongozi said, and “it was good to get our hands dirty.”
Sheen edited Fly in one night. Many of the aesthetic choices were dictated by practical considerations. “We made it silent so that it could be projected outside while people were skating,” Barongozi said. It also allowed them to make a film without needing audio equipment to capture the sound. They had one camera, and “making it sound good would have been more money, more equipment,” Barongozi said. The limitation also turned out to have an advantage, in that “the subjects could just talk naturally,” and they could be interviewed at New Haven’s skate parks, without worrying about background noise.
The decision to make the film black and white was informed by the purpose in making it. “It was one of those aesthetic choices. Once it was silent, mood-wise it went together and paired well,” Barongozi said. “The whole idea of the film was to be in the background” at the downtown skate park, where it could be played “over and over.” If you were there, you could watch it in its entirety or just “catch a little thing if you want.”
“It was a mood thing, instead of it being its own subject,” Barongozi said.
Fly did indeed play while people skated at the temporary downtown skate park. But the duo also presented it to the Midnight Oil Collective, an arts incubator through the Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking at Yale. There, Barongozi explained that “we would give it to anybody who would make music with it.” Harris saw that presentation and “he was inspired to do something with it.… He worked on it so much that he made it the basis of his own project.”
Harris’s connection to Fly, it turned out, preceded the film’s completion. “Unbeknownst to them, I was there,” in Scantlebury Park, when they were shooting one of their interviews. At that time, somewhere at the skate park, someone was playing drum and bass from a Bluetooth speaker, a style of electronic dance music that had its origins in the UK club scene in the 1990s. Harris is old enough to have associations from his own youth with drum and bass when it first arrived.
“It didn’t occur to me that the youngest skateboarding generation would even have that musical reference,” Harris said. “Right at that moment, I realized I was experiencing one of those trans-generational moments.” Through music, “we had a way of connecting without consciously realizing it.” It happened again when he visited Edgewood Park’s skate park and encountered a DJ spinning jungle and drum and bass again.
Harris himself identified with the sense of “joy and freedom and a little bit of rebellion” he saw in skating. “It led me down this path of working on an EP” — one that, with its grounding in EDM, perhaps “differs stylistically from what other artists might have done,” something more ambient.
Lotta Studio Photo
Ionne.
In the process, he found himself working through something of the history of jungle and drum and bass as EDM styles. Drum and bass “has gone through changes as to how it’s produced,” Harris said. In its infancy in the 1990s, it was — as the name of the genre suggests — very sparse. Since then, it has become “very full.” Likewise, Harris’s early versions of the songs on Right Foot Front “were very stripped back,” hearkening back to “my first enounter with drum and bass.”
But over time, each of the songs developed more intricate arrangements, updating the sound in the process without losing touch with its origins. For Harris, it was about “keeping the parts of the old that were most authentically me and integrating it with newer production styles that would have a connection to a younger audience.”
That applied to the many artists featured on the songs as well. Partly, Harris said, “it was about finding the voices for the project that matched the voices in my head” when he wrote the songs. “When I go into a musical project, the composition is already completed in my head.”
The London accent on the song “Right Foot Front” was a “throwback, a nod” to the origins of the musical style. But other songs branch out to American hip hop and spoken word. “The spoken word part was about accepting the work as a kind of storytelling,” Harris said, reflecting the original film. He wanted “Black voices to tell the story in a way that I felt most authentically represented the people in the documentary.”
Harris didn’t write Right Foot Front as a score for Fly, but he has tried running the album and the documentary simultaneously to see how they fit together. “I was intrigued at how there are points of intersection and points of divergence that feel more intentional than they really were,” he said. But in another sense, it’s not surprising, given Fly’s heavy inspiration.
“Once you immerse yourself in the idea and you’re ready to create,” Harris said, “let the work come.” So Right Foot Front and Fly come together.
Barongozi and Harris have continued to collaborate, pairing paintings and music for events around town. Meanwhile, Right Foot Front’s cover image is by New Haven photographer Herve Locus, “who specializes in skateboard photography,” Harris said. Through Locus, Harris could further “test the authenticity” of the album he was making. “It was gratifying to know that it was being accepted.” He speculated that perhaps it was because his music, the documentary, and skateboarding in a sense come from the same place — a place of “joy and fun.”
For Barongozi, Ionne’s album makes perfect sense. Making Fly, after all, was always about “trying to collaborate with people and doing stuff you like,” they said. “It fulfilled what it was supposed to be” in becoming “a continuous collaboration. I don’t think it will ever end.”
Right Foot Front is available through Bandcamp. Fly is available on YouTube.