Few places are as exciting to watch musicians in action, certainly online, as Soundcloud.com. The artist pages on Soundcloud have their own distinct sensibility, as distinct from MySpace as MySpace is from Bandcamp, and on, and on through the mall of malls that is the Internet. Soundcloud, for various reasons, has been embraced as both momentary sketchpad and full-fledged record store by musicians. So while you’ll certainly come across finished tracks and full-length recordings available both for sale and, wittingly, courtesy of netlabels and open-minded musicians, for free download, you’ll also find endless examples of musicians posting works-in-progress. Sometimes, if you’re lucky to happen upon them, you’ll even find examples of those progressions side by side.
Take for example these by Kate Carr, both renditions of piece titled “Sounds of Hawaii.” True to the title, it’s a lulling work, the suspended phrases and deep pauses suggesting Miles Davis, circa In a Silent Way, a nostalgic nod abetted by the track’s employment of rusty vinyl surface noise:
Version One:
Version Two:
Tracks originally posted, over the course of the last month or so, at soundcloud.com/katecarr. More on Carr, who is based in Sydney, Australia, at listentotheweather.com.