Pole interview – “I can definitely remember the reason for every track that I ever made”

We meet the Berlin-based master of dubtronica

“In mum’s case it happened slowly,” says Stefan Betke aka Pole, describing the creeping dementia that eventually overtook her, “One day she forgot how to cook a potato… Or I’d be with her and go to the toilet and when I came back she’d say ‘nice of you to visit me’..  I’d only have been in there for 15 seconds.”

The theme of memory, sparked by this experience with his now departed mother, has casts its shadow across his most recent album Fading – his first for 15 years – and the recently released two track EP ‘Tanzboden’.  The title of the latter literally means forgotten, but can also refer to a kind of temporary dancefloor built in rural farming communities in local a field to celebrate a successful harvest time.  After the dancing is over, it’s left to decay, until the nuts and bolts that hold it together rust and it finally falls apart.

Berlin-based Betke was fascinated by the way dementia affected his mother.  “What I found really interesting was that she remembered as lot of things from her childhood and youth up to 14 or 15 years of ages.  She was telling me about them in a lot of detail.   She had a neighbour who was an oil painter and on her 10th birthday gave her an oil painting, and this neighbour always called her Roisen – which is the small form of rose, like a baby rose.”

Betke says he didn’t embark on the project as a way to “deal with the fact” or heal himself, he was simply fascinated by the idea itself.  “To think that somebody loses all their memory and everything that made them a human being over 91 years is incredible.  You build something up – you go to school, you meet people, you are In a social situation, you are interacting with others, you make mistakes and you make good decisions, you go in the wrong direction and you go in the right direction.  And then suddenly you don’t remember anything that happened 10 minutes ago.”

Born in Düsseldorf,  and taking his artist name from the Waldorf 4-Pole filter that he’s used extensively in his work, Betke has built a fearsome reputation for making deep, dubby electronic music that stretches back to 1998’s debut album 1.  The music may be abstract and impressionist, with titles that offer little clue to their contents, but Betke says he’s aware of the specific inspiration

“I can definitely remember the reason for every track that I ever made.  Simply because if it’s not important input into my brain, or my understanding of the world through architecture or forests or whatever, then I wouldn’t actually work on it.  I think a lot about the ideas before working on the track – so why I started this or that track is probably the most important part to me.

“The titles are kind of like a reference so that they can be found afterwards in my archive – they’re not important.  None of my tracks have titles before I’ve written them.   They’re just to help people like you.”

The inspiration for the two tracks on the ‘Tanzboden’ EP came when he began looking over the sessions for Fading in his Berlin studio.  He was intending to remind himself and research how the album had been constructed with a view to starting its successor.  In the process, he found something a little different – two loops that had been abandoned during the making of Fading but, given time and space from the album, held a certain fascination.

The two tracks both link back to Fading, he tells us, and at the same time they mark the beginning of new recordings.  Listening to them with a new album in mind, he liked them far more than you had done at the time.

“I found it pretty interesting because I found these loops on my hard drive and they are part of the history already because Fading is done, the book is closed on that.  But other loops keep popping up in my memory.  It was half a year or maybe nearly a year after I finished Fading.  Even right in the middle of working on the next album.  I mean, usually, I’d be much slower about starting a new one, but with Corona, no travelling, no live shows, I had enough time to start working on a new album – as many other artists have had.  So then I figured these loops out – they’re a transition line between ‘Fading; and the new one.  So it was important for me to work on them, to keep the memory of the old stuff, everything I recorded around it, and get that going into the next step.

“The new album will be different to the two tracks on the EP but they will work together – it is an understandable link between Fading and the next one.  The two loops made in the production process for Fading – I didn’t use them because I didn’t get along with them then.  I liked the ideas but compared to the other tracks on the album, they didn’t really fit.  Kind of an outtake – but hardly even an outtake, just four bar loops I thought OK, let’s try to work with them with the distance I’ve got now.”

The relationship between memory, perception, context and time and the effect it has on creativity continues to fascinate him.  “If you are producing a record, whether it’s a 12” or an album, you’re in this zone where you just concentrate on the best results.  There are so many things we have to wait for – making music has a lot do with – in my understanding anyway – waiting for that right input.

“Sometimes you work on something and it doesn’t work and it sleeps there until you need it.   With some tunes it works but you’re not sure it’ll work for any longer than four or five bars.  Then you wait long enough and suddenly, boom, you have something that works for a minute, say, and then you go with that.  So I’m pretty sure I have more memories stored on my hard drive that never saw the light of day at the time   That’s life as well – at the moment I’m going somewhere else.

“Time is the most important thing in making art.  It happens so often to me that I do something, I wrote it and I like it, I keep it running and the more I listen  to it the more I like it.  Then you do something else, you travel or you master something, or you work on different stuff, and then two weeks later you open it up again and you’re like ‘fuck – why did I do that?’”

It’s a delicate business for sure.  He laughs recalling the distraction-avoiding attitude of late New York scene avant garde trumpeter Jon Hassall, who passed away in late June of this year.  Because of Betke’s other job – he’s one of the most respected vinyl mastering engineers in Europe, working out of the same Berlin studios as Basic Channel – he’d had a close working relationship with Hassall, being invited to collaborate on one of his albums. 

“He was sending me music because he wanted me to add some samples to it – I was listening to it, I think, while I was making the Yellow album.  We met privately when he was in Berlin and we talked a lot, it was a very nice time.  I wanted to send him Fading so I emailed him and said ‘hey I’m listening to your new album at the moment, can I send you my music as well?’

“He was like, ‘no you can’t – because I’m not listening to any music when I’m working on my own music.  It’s because I’m taking the necessary waiting time in my day.  He was definitely one of the most extreme persons I’ve ever met in this regard anyway.  I never listen to that much other music when I’m working on an album either, but I’m not that strict, I’m not turning off the radio and the TV.  I tend to listen to other music, not electronic, when I’m working on my music.”

He totally understood Hassall’s point of view.  “He was a fucking intelligent person,”  says Betke, “But I will never forget that.  I didn’t take it personally!”

As compliments go, it’s one that fits as easily with his personality – modest but resolute, exploratory and thinking on levels most of us very rarely reach. The fact that Pole’s carefully crafted and curated music is no accident was obvious to most. The extent to which it is conceptualised, however, is a surprise.

Thankfully for us, after the 15 year wait for Fading, its follow up is likely far more quickly. Work is well underway, and it is taking shape in very specific ways. It does have its own new musical direction already, he tells us, but refuses to be drawn on divulging that character in any detail, simply because if he changes creative tack subsequently, people will be disorientated about being presented with something different to what they expected.

But, although his inspiration and the results it creates may be difficult to predict – least of all by himself – we can be sure of it being as different, challenging and rewarding as everything else he’s ever released. We can’t wait.

Ben Willmott