The popular failure of SoundCloud’s mainstream streaming service, SoundCloud Go, served primarily to highlight just how much SoundCloud’s strengths rest on the far other end of the production-consumption spectrum. SoundCloud is good for many things, and what it’s particularly good for is sketches, for bits of music recorded and posted as two conjoined halves of a self-contained act of musical self-expression.
Take “Sketch1” by Debashis Sinha, whose awareness of SoundCloud’s utility for fragments and byproducts is evidenced by the final sentence of his account bio: “This soundcloud page hosts exclusive content from projects not available elsewhere.” Sinha has plenty of other elsewheres, including a healthy debsinha.bandcamp.com page, but SoundCloud is where his works-in-progress reside, much as Sinha’s Instagram account currently hosts pictures of his creative space in the theater where he is at work on a production score.
Instagram shows where Sinha is at, and SoundCloud shows what he’s up to. On Instagram, people who post frequently will often take it for granted that their images are being experienced in real time, which is why they might add a #latergram tag if they’ve already moved on to another location, another mood. SoundCloud isn’t quite so timed to the very moment, but the instant works that do appear on the site have a feeling of what the creator’s mind is focused currently. Which means Sinha’s mind is currently focused on downtempo rhythms, light industrial percussion, and deftly deployed string samples, all of which constitute the excellent 47-second “Sketch1” posted earlier today.
Track originally posted to soundcloud.com/debsinha. More from Sinha, who is based in Toronto, Canada, at debsinha.com and twitter.com/sinhadeb.
Thanks so much for this Marc – spot on analysis. You nailed it exactly.