The video for Ionne’s latest single “The Last Time” — off his new album Fracture — sends the viewer into a spiral from the start. When the camera finally stops spinning, it’s still moving, and there is Ionne himself, singing into the darkness on a beach, a crashed spaceship behind him. “All we ever feared / Was killing time / Several hundred years / Amount to castles that we’ll never own / And songs I write / But cannot sing myself / Our dreams of spaceships and their secret plans to take us somewhere else,” he sings. It’s a melody about loss, but the music isn’t about giving up. It’s about falling down and getting up again, of finding the strength to start something new.
The single and the video are the tip of the spear for the release of Fracture, which will happen this Friday, Sept. 30 with an “excital,” that is, part exhibition, part recital, at NXTHVN on Henry Street in Dixwell. The event isn’t just a celebration of the album, but of the ongoing collaboration between Ionne and The Collective NHV, a group of artists focused on photography and fashion, as of the New Haven arts scene overall, in which Ionne has found a welcome home.
The Collective NHV Photos
Ionne.
“The video itself was serendipitous,” said Maurice Harris, a.k.a. Ionne. Though in another sense it was the result of months of planning, after Harris read about The Collective NHV — Kasaad Bullock (cofounder, photographer, editor, creative direction), Stephen Jackson (cofounder, photographer, editor), Vijor McCray (stylist, creative director, posing instructor, editor), and Xavier Hill (photographer, editor) — in a newspaper article and reached out to them.
“When I saw what they were doing, it was on the edge of fashion and culture and art, and there was a sophistication to it, but a street-ness” too, Harris said. “It was elevating everyday culture. That is the aesthetic that I wanted to capture in the visuals for this new album.” As with his 2021 album For Those Who Remain, “I was also looking for a photographer who could spin it into a story,” though with a “completely different approach” than he took for his previous effort. He wanted the “sci-fi art-film vibe” that he saw in the Collective’s work.
He and the Collective began collaborating in August 2021. “Things were still in a strange place from a social perspective” regarding the pandemic, Harris said. But they figured it out. They did some photo shoots indoors. Then the Collective set up a photo shoot on a beach in West Haven — featuring the structure that appears in the video.
“When I saw what they had created — the alien crash landing site — I said, ‘we definitely have to get some behind-the-scenes footage. It’s too cool to just dismantle,’” Harris said. “They got out the video camera.” Someone in the Collective had the idea that they should shoot some video and Harris had the backing track for “The Last Time” handy. “There was something about the song — the intensity, the heaviness of it, just when you think it can’t get darker,” Harris said, that spoke to the Collective. “I started singing the song on the beach, and a small audience gathered.”
Later, when Harris was looking at the footage, “I saw how intuitively everything flowed together,” he said. “I’m not even sure it was the photographer’s intent,” but “initially there’s this intent focus on me,” and “then you see the smoke effect.… A hand creeps into the frame.… You start to see elements of the artifice.”
To Harris, it “spoke to the theme of the song,” he said, “the idea of breaking down the notion of the faith and trust we put in government and family” and other institutions that structure our lives. “Those things eventually break down, and we have the power and the tools to rebuild them for ourselves.”
Break It Down, Build It Up
That the themes in “The Last Time” are mirrored throughout the album is no accident. Harris made Fracture with the intent of making a true album-length work. “It’s one thing to do a bunch of singles and then another to put them together as an album. It was very intentional,” he said.
He also intentionally leaned into the direction the music took, toward a darker, grittier sound. “I felt like the message of the album is meant to be more direct and more arresting than the previous album. I didn’t want it to feel happy most of the time. I didn’t want this to be mistaken for an upbeat, pop record,” he said.
The goal wasn’t hopelessness, either, however. “I don’t leave everything on a dark, dystopian note,” Harris said. Rather, the goal was introspection. Harris wanted to challenge a listener to sit with the themes and the uncomfortableness of it, to notice that a song could be about a personal relationship that is breaking down and falling apart, but also “could be talking about more than a physical relationship that is breaking down”; it could be “about humankind and the environment.”
“I think we can find, in our interpersonal relationships, metaphors for other aspects of life, that may have grander implications,” Harris said. The final song, “A Reason to Believe,” “leaves the listener with a brighter note — can you find a way home? If you can’t, then I would love you to stay,” he said. “It’s what I’ve heard priests say in church on Sundays. When you’re tempted to lose patience with people who are different than you, remember that they’re different, just like you.”
In moving from darkness to light, the music could convey a message, to “recognize that powerlessness, to a great extent, is a myth. We have more power and agency than we appreciate, and that we are taught to exert,” Harris said, and these are “powers we have within ourselves.”
An album about the “breakdown of systems and objects of faith,” as Harris put it, has some resonance with the tumult of the past five years. To Harris, that’s not a coincidence. “I’d say it’s very much the culmination of that,” he said. “Here we’re looking at the world that is in the midst of the fire next time” that James Baldwin warned us about; “we’re well within the fire.”
But “we have the means to reframe and rebuild,” he said. He has taken some issue with the phrase “the new normal” thrown around in the media of late. “Pandemic, climate change, threats to democracy, shootings, the opioid crisis — these are not ‘normal,’ ” he said. “They are the result of human intervention. And we, through intervention, can find the power to make positive change, hopefully as dramatic as we’ve seen these breakdowns be.”
Come Together
The Collective NHV.
In bringing Fracture to an audience, “it was important to me to find New Haven-based collaborators — creatives who are in my area,” Harris said. “Where you are, where you’re from, factors into the work that you do, sometimes in ways you don’t appreciate.” These things affect “how we imagine the spaces in which we live.”
This line of thinking led Harris to considering the possibility of a gathering to celebrate the release of the album. “At the time I started working with the Collective, we had been working toward the idea of an exhibition” with the concept to “integrate the visual and the musical component,” he said. “All the creativity that went into the production that you otherwise never get to see.”
NXTHVN proved to be the ideal place for such an event. “We were looking for a venue to host the party, and NXTHVN was really welcoming. They loved the story behind the album and were eager to have the party here because of the connection to local artists,” Harris said. The excital will be thrown in a recently renovated part of the facility. Those who attend on Friday “get to be among the first to see this newly designed space.” The gallery “offers a place for contemplation of the work,” and the event will feature an artist talkback.
In connecting with The Collective NHV and NXTHVN, Harris has made fast inroads into the New Haven arts scene, especially as he arrived here just as the pandemic struck and spent the first year of living here in a city under lockdown. But as Harris sees it, “I felt since I arrived that New Haven is so gracious to its arts community, especially to me, as someone new to the area,” he said. “Being able to produce works that were resonating with folks locally really meant a lot to me.”
He sees his own experience writ large across the city. “I’ve seen the support it has for its artists and its arts community here. It really elevates. I love it.” He wondered aloud, too, if there wasn’t something about the pace of life in the Elm City that made it a particularly good place to make art, as there is plenty to do, but not too much to do. “It’s easier to make the headspace for creating your work. You’re not so pulled to and fro by all the other things you have to do,” he said. Harris speaks from experience; even as he’s finalizing plans for Friday, he’s already working on new music.
Ionne’s new album Fracture comes out on all major platforms on Friday, Sept. 30. The excital happens at NXTHVN, 169 Henry St., on Sept. 30 at 7 p.m. To learn more about Ionne and Fracture and to get tickets to the upcoming excital, visit Ionne’s website.
