One of the beauties of SoundCloud.com is the casual nature of much of its content. Musicians upload not only finished recordings but works-in-progress, which serve as windows into their creative process, arguably providing a more intimate, fluid, and digitally natural listening experience that do sites whose structure is more clearly modeled on the brick’n'mortar system of a traditional record store. Often as not, these experimental, mid-process SoundCloud-housed tracks are brief, in the one-minute range, though in the realm of electronic music, they are only short on first listen — they are then adapted by fellow musicians (unfolding into myriad remixes), or simply set on loop.
A one-minute dub track, such as Kyle TM’s “New Year Dub,” easily turns into a half-hour of trance-worthy listening. In fact, while many short pieces on SoundCloud merely make for repeat listening, in this case it’s Kyle TM’s intent: “Meant to be looped,” he writes in a brief accompanying liner note. The piece has a familiar dub reggae rhythm, tweaked with a squeaky, delectably sour, further-off-the-beat percussive, like a screw is loose somewhere in the sound system.
Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/kyletm. More from Kyle TM, who’s based in Greer, South Carolina, at thekyletm.tumblr.com and twitter.com/thekyletm.