The musical world of Kahlil Joseph

A career committed to blurring the lines between art and music.

Kahlil Joseph has been in conversation with The Vinyl Factory and 180 Studios for the better part of a decade.

His double-screen installation for Kendrick Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d city was staged at 180 Studios as part of The Infinite Mix in 2016 and wasone of the defining works in a show that made the case that popular music and gallery space should be seen together.

Fly Paper, his polyphonic portrait of Black art and culture in New York, was commissioned by The Store X The Vinyl Factory, debuting in 2017 before its soundtrack was subsequently released on purple vinyl by VF in 2018.

Over two decades, the Los Angeles filmmaker has built a body of work that refuses easy categorisation, directing for Flying Lotus, Kendrick Lamar, FKA twigs and Beyoncé while also making work that belongs in gallery spaces as much as it does on screens or in headphones.‍

BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions is where it all comes together. Joseph’s debut feature, structured like an album, premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival and is currently screening at The Underground Cinema at 180 Studios.

Below, we trace the creative arc that brought him here: from Aloe Blacc to Beyoncé and from Watts to Freetown.

Aloe Blacc

I Need a Dollar

Before the Sundance prizes and the Beyoncé credits, Joseph directed the video for Aloe Blacc’s ubiquitous breakthrough single, later used as the theme for HBO’s How to Make It in America.

An early example of Joseph’s tendency to treat music videos as something closer to cinema, “I Need a Dollar” is a split-screen piece in which a man navigates New York’s streets on one side of the frame while Blacc sings from an apartment on the other.

Tonally more modest than Joseph’s later work, it already shows his observational approach and his instinct for elevating the music video beyond straightforward promotion.

Shabazz Palaces

Belhaven Meridian

Joseph directed the Belhaven Meridian film for Ishmael Butler's experimental hip-hop project Shabazz Palaces in 2011. Shot in a single take on 35mm black-and-white film in Watts, Joseph pays homage to Charles Burnett's 1977 classic Killer of Sheep.

‍In an interview, Joseph explained that "working on Shabazz Palaces was like the Holy Grail" adding that the films were about "being inside the music versus being on top of it." The distinction between accompanying a song and inhabiting its world can be seen throughout Joseph's practice to date.

Flying Lotus

Until the Quiet Comes

For many viewers, Until the Quiet Comes was their first introduction to Joseph’s work. His short film for Flying Lotus reimagines South Los Angeles as a space in which death and rebirth coexist as a boy is shot, leaves his body, and returns transformed.

Set in Watts and built around three tracks from Flying Lotus’ fourth studio album, the film won the Short Film Special Jury Award at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival. Kara Walker later included it in her 2014 Ruffneck Constructivists exhibition at ICA Philadelphia.

The creative relationship between Joseph and FlyLo would continue, and Flying Lotus’ music also features in the world of BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions.

FKA twigs

Video Girl

An unsettling black-and-white short film in which twigs witnesses a lethal injection, carries out elaborate choreo around the body while Travis Scott makes a brief cameo. "Video Girl” operates as a self-contained piece of cinema within the world of twigs’ 2014 release LP1. It is one of Joseph’s clearest demonstrations of how choreography, music and image can come together for abstract, brief story-telling.

Kendrick Lamar

m.A.A.d

Not a music video in the conventional sense, Joseph's m.A.A.d is a short film inspired by the world of Lamar's album rather than a visual for any specific track.

It was first shown as a double-screen projection at the Underground Museum in Los Angeles, the gallery space co-founded by Joseph's late brother, the painter Noah Davis.

Later staged as part of The Infinite Mix at 180 Studios in 2016, the work was another high point in how popular music and gallery spaces could intersect — an idea that runs directly through to BLKNWS' screening at 180 Studios' Underground Cinema a decade later

Beyoncé

Sorry

Joseph’s contribution to the Lemonade visual album brought his approach into one of the decade’s defining mainstream pop works. Officially credited as a co-director and recognised with an Emmy nomination, he was part of a project that treated music as a larger visual and sonic spectacle. Lemonade is significant as a moment when a visual language shaped in experimental film and gallery contexts entered the biggest stage in popular culture, opening the eyes of millions to the power of music video as a medium.

Sampha

Process

Joseph’s 37-minute film for the title track of Sampha's Mercury Prize-winning debut album in 2017 is among his most emotionally impactful works.

Moving between Freetown and Morden, South London, it mirrors the album’s preoccupations with loss, family and interior transformation, using a freeform structure that drifts between performance, documentary gesture and dream image.

The collaboration deepened Joseph's engagement with British music and with artists whose work trades in restraint and emotionality. Sampha's music appears in BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions, continuing a creative relationship that now spans nearly a decade.

Various Artists

Fly Paper

Featuring music by Kelsey Lu, Alice Smith, Thundercat, Niki Randa, Kelan Phil Cohran and Legacy and soundscapes and score by James William Blades, Fly Paper captures the sounds of Joseph's A/V installation of the same name, commissioned by Store X and The Vinyl Factory in 2017.

A rich and polyphonic portrait of Black art and culture in New York City, Fly Paper's soundtrack is packed with artists whose work is imbued with the same spirit of high culture and popular culture collaboration and sees appearances from long term collaborators including Flying Lotus.

The Vinyl Factory released it on 180g purple vinyl that can be ordered here.

Various Artists

BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions

All of that reaches a kind of culmination in BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions. Currently screening at the Underground Cinema in 180 Studios, BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions is a distinctive cinematic experience that mirrors the sonic textures of an album or mixtape, the film weaves fiction and history in an immersive journey where the fictionalised figures of W. E. B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey join artists, musicians, Joseph's family, and even Twitter chats, in a vision for Black consciousness.

If Joseph’s career has been defined by a refusal to keep cinema, music video, installation and sound in separate boxes, this is one of its clearest expressions. BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions is a work in which image behaves musically and music becomes a way of looking at history.

With a score composed by Klein and song contributions from Robert Hood, Aphex Twin, Flying Lotus and more, the soundtrack and film is a realisation of Kahlil's career long vision – the blurring of lines between cinema, music video and album to become one elevated medium under his direction.

BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions is screening at The Underground Cinema at 180 Studios until March 27. Order tickets now.