CHICAGO’S enlightened future breaks producer The Twilite Tone has just unveiled the video for “Do It Properly”, one of the standout tracks from his diaristic debut album for Stones Throw, The Clearing. Delight in it below.
The video is something of a paean to Chicago and the life Tone lives; you can see him popping his way through the Windy City, out on the shores of Lake Michigan, playing in the park with his daughter.
The video was directed by Christine Ciszczon, his collaborator all the way through this debut album project as photographer. Tone says that using Chicago locations that have played a pivotal role throughout his life, and dancing through them, he is using movement as “a way to let go not only emotionally but also physically of both traumas and triumphs.”
Of the song itself, a lush essay in forward-looking electro hiphop instrumentalism: “’Do It Properly’ is an ever-evolving suite. The intro is taken from a speech by Dr Khalid Muhammad, which Public Enemy also used to open ‘Night Of The Living Baseheads’, a song that came out around the same time I had been courting the N.O.I. [Nation of Islam] in the late ‘80s.
“I repurposed the soundbite as a call and response that speaks in past tense, reminding me that I have been brought to a place where I have taken my ‘name, reputation, language, religion, culture, go’ and even ‘mind’ away, so I can come to a new place, space and time.”
And of the album? “The Clearing is a space and place of being free. We need to clear the debris from the desk and see the mahogany wood, so we can do the work. I don’t just want to talk, I want to do the work.”
We reviewed The Clearing here, and said of it: “It’s a pretty seamless trip through his music and his musical loves. It’s a journey, a multifaceted sonic excursion, best enjoyed absolutely as a whole – in that it shares ground with Endtroducing … .
In fact, if you were ever seduced by Mo’Wax when it was a truly great, genre-busting, peerless purveyor of breaks, this is totally the album for you.”
The Twilite Tone’s The Clearing is out now on digital and vinyl formats via Stones Throw. You can order your copy direct from the label here, if you’re Stateside; or Piccadilly Records, in the UK.
