The lockdown has played havoc with album release schedules, sending new records by Haim, Rufus Wainwright, Jarvis Cocker and the Pretenders back several weeks. But adversity can create opportunity – or at least the chance to nerd out over a reissue by a little-known electronic auteur: Pole, the alias of German musician Stefan Betke.
Betke knows all about taking advantage of an opportunity, joining a long artistic tradition of making great art from mistakes. Just as Leonardo da Vinci famously instructed his students to study stains and blots for inspiration, and the Japanese pottery technique of kintsugi repairs broken earthenware with precious metals, creating beauty from a flaw, Pole turned his butterfingers into a masterstroke.
Some time around 1996, Betke dropped a piece of kit. His damaged Waldorf 4-Pole analogue filter still worked, but issued unruly hisses and pops. Rather than chucking out the offending item, its itchy static became the operational conceit of Pole’s subsequent trilogy of albums, completed across the cusp of the millennium – innovative electronic works now remastered and reissued as a box set, with a bonus 12in from the same period, Raum (1998). Immersive to the point of obsession, detailed like a cathedral ceiling, the first three Pole records not only take a glitch and make it a feature, they serve up vast, emotional music that spans the gamut from would-be thriller soundtracks to ambient awe.
It is not without precedent – there are obvious links to systems music; “glitch” became a busy subgenre around the same time, with the German experimental label Mille Plateaux releasing a series of compilations called Clicks and Cuts – but Pole’s 1 (it has a blue cover), 2 (red) and 3 (yellow) have not only stood the test of 20 years, they still sound like little else around. You could just as easily file these notionally techno albums under contemporary classical, or dub reggae. They went on to influence any number of electronic auteurs; dubstep exists in the same continuum, and the quiet intimacy of these records finds a forward echo in the club-at-home sounds of the xx. Betke himself continues to record and play – he released another great album, Wald, in 2015 – but lives quietly as a mastering engineer and label boss.
Much electronic and digital music thumbs its nose at the vinyl crackle and tape hiss of analogue, producing cleaner machine sound; Betke’s Pole trilogy made this sleekness dusty again. In Berlin in the late 90s, he was working in the thick of minimal techno, a subgenre that took this most relentless of club musics and dialled it down to a gestural ghost of its former self. Betke had grown up studying piano, playing jazz and getting into hip-hop, so had particularly open ears. In a ninja move, he chose to pair the cockroach skitter created by the broken filter with the barely-there twitch of minimal, adding the wide-open vistas of dub reggae. He offset the trebly ASMR frissons with spacious echo and lush bass.
A lot happens in a very confined creative space. Modul, the first track on 1, begins in near silence, looping what sounds like vinyl crackle into a beat. Disembodied notes gradually coalesce into a hint of a melody; sonar bloops serve as bass. This basic template is reborn again and again, with what reveals itself to be a startling range of variations. If you are the sort of person who can find the melodies in the hum of the spin dryer and the plaintive whalesong in feedback, Pole is your guy.
As the albums go on, the affinity to techno gradually falls away. You can, just about, dance to Pole’s stuff – Kirschenessen on 1 is a microtonal rave, which features a set of birdlike chirps, miniature rushes and a dancefloor build that is one huge tease, promising a climax that never comes. Tanzen is a banger, with nods to Kraftwerk.
Really, though, these are dub albums, in which the BPMs reduce to a stately and calming nod. But this is dub with the compositional clout of modern classical and the ordered mindset of digital music; a chiaroscuro of cold and warmth. There is an arc: roughly, 1 cleaves the closest to minimal techno, while 2 represents the giddy high point of the trilogy, where it goes seriously reggae. 3 stays with dub, but gets even more detailed and abstracted, its genius only marred by the intrusion of human found sound on tracks like Taxi and Karussell.
My favourite is 2, whose opening clarion of melodica-like notes on Fahren (“travel”) elicits a Pavlovian response. With its acrylic near-beat, Stadt once again mobilises minimal techno as Betke detonates resonant fireworks in the background. By Uberfahrt (“crossing”) on 3, the mood is pensive and wistful. Throughout, Betke is hugely concerned with space, with radio silence, which is never really silent, with the decaying and reflowering of sound.
Put one of these records on in the dark and it might sound austere, or even threatening, as though insect armies were busy inheriting the earth. Unleash Pole in the sunshine and you can hear the joy Betke takes in the natural world, in the microtones actually going on all around us; his later work – Wald means “forest” – made this inclination more plain. It’s absolutely worth staying with Betke, because the itchiness doesn’t stay haunted for long. Everything here plays out into a kind of symphonic beauty.
