S3NTIENCE Radio Edits & Remixes

There’s a pretty clear distinction between how I think about Spotify and how I think about SoundCloud.

Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and the other major streaming platforms are essentially the home of the official S3NTIENCE catalog. That’s where you’ll find the albums, EPs, and singles that I formally release through distribution.

SoundCloud contains those releases too, but it also gives me somewhere to put the things that don’t necessarily belong in the official discography.

Radio edits. Alternate versions. Experimental ideas. Different arrangements. And eventually, probably remixes.

That makes SoundCloud something of an extended version of the S3NTIENCE catalog.

If I make a variation of an existing track that I like enough to share, but don’t necessarily feel needs its own worldwide release across every streaming service, SoundCloud gives it somewhere to live.

Two examples of that already exist: the radio edits of Approaching Divinity and Blind Dates With Deities.

Approaching Divinity

Approaching Divinity is one of the more uplifting instrumental tracks on Blind Dates With Deities.

There aren’t any vocals carrying the emotional message, so almost everything has to come through the melody, harmony, atmosphere, and progression of the track itself.

I’ve always found instrumental electronic music interesting for that reason.

Without lyrics explicitly telling you what a song is about, the listener gets a little more freedom to interpret it however they want. A chord progression or melody can feel hopeful to one person, nostalgic to another, and bittersweet to somebody else.

Approaching Divinity also plays an important role in the sequencing of the album.

Even the name suggests that something is getting closer.

It helps lead toward the album’s title track, Blind Dates With Deities, which arrives later and expands considerably on some of the cinematic and emotional ideas that appear throughout the record.

The original version of Approaching Divinity runs 4 minutes and 40 seconds.

The radio edit runs 3 minutes and 42 seconds.

There weren’t really substantial compositional changes involved in creating it. The idea wasn’t to reinterpret the track or turn it into something different. It was simply about compressing the experience into a shorter format.

The destination is basically the same.

You just get there faster.

Electronic Music Used to Be Longer

That idea also connects to something much bigger that’s happened to electronic music over the years.

The way people consume music has changed, and song structures have changed with it.

Go back far enough into the history of electronic dance music and six-, seven-, or eight-minute tracks weren’t unusual at all.

Part of that was simply because streaming didn’t exist yet.

But there was also a practical reason for those longer arrangements.

Electronic dance music was heavily intertwined with DJ culture, and tracks often needed substantial intros and outros so DJs had enough runway to mix records together smoothly. You might spend a minute listening to drums, percussion, bass, and gradually introduced elements before the main musical idea even fully arrived.

Those sections served a purpose.

Today, the average listener is much more likely to encounter a song through Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, TikTok, or another digital platform than through a DJ mixing two physical records together.

That changes the equation.

Most listeners don’t necessarily need 60 or 90 seconds of relatively minimal percussion before reaching the melody or vocal they came to hear.

So the hierarchy has almost flipped.

The tighter version increasingly becomes the standard release, while the longer DJ-friendly version becomes the extended mix.

One of the funniest examples of that shift for me was seeing a roughly four-minute electronic track labeled as an extended mix.

If you grew up listening to older electronic music, that feels almost absurd.

There was a time when a four-minute version probably would’ve been the radio edit, while the original version might’ve stretched six, seven, eight, or even nine minutes.

Now, plenty of original releases hover somewhere around two and a half to three minutes, and a four- or five-minute version can qualify as extended.

Neither approach is inherently better.

It’s just a reflection of how the format has evolved alongside the way people listen.

Three Versions of Blind Dates With Deities

The title track of Blind Dates With Deities is probably an even better example of that evolution.

The original version runs 7 minutes and 48 seconds.

That length was intentional.

It’s structured more like a long-form electronic journey than a modern streaming single, and in some ways it’s a callback to the era when electronic tracks were routinely given seven, eight, or nine minutes to develop.

Blind Dates With Deities also has two sides to its personality.

There are orchestral and cinematic elements throughout the track, but underneath all of that, there’s also a groove that I really liked.

That groove eventually became the foundation for the Blind Dates With Deities Club Mix.

The club mix runs 6 minutes and 17 seconds, so it’s still a substantial piece of music, but it keeps the energy somewhat more consistent and leans further into the dance-floor side of the original composition.

Then there’s the radio edit.

That version runs just 3 minutes and 31 seconds.

At that point, you’re looking at less than half the runtime of the original track.

The idea is essentially to get straight to the meat of the song.

Instead of asking the listener to settle into an almost eight-minute progression, the radio edit focuses on delivering the central musical ideas in a much tighter window.

Same song.

Three different listening experiences.

And that’s part of what I enjoy about making alternate versions in the first place.

The Extended S3NTIENCE Catalog

That’s ultimately what I want SoundCloud to become.

The major streaming services will remain the home of the official S3NTIENCE releases, while SoundCloud can be a little more flexible.

Sometimes that’ll mean radio edits like these.

Sometimes it might mean alternate arrangements or experiments that don’t warrant a formal release.

And eventually, it’ll probably include remixes of other artists’ music too.

I haven’t really started doing remix work yet because, at the moment, I’m still having too much fun creating original music.

But if a song eventually inspires me enough to reinterpret it, or if an interesting official remix competition comes along, there’s a very good chance SoundCloud will be the first place that version appears.

So if Spotify represents the official S3NTIENCE discography, SoundCloud is where you can expect to find some of what exists around the edges of it.

The edits, experiments, alternate versions, and eventually the remixes.

Sometimes the things that don’t fit neatly into the official catalog are worth hearing too.