Pole Opinion

I have received a new batch of LFTWY issues, so expect 3 old album reviews in quick succession. This is from the 1999 issue. Small but crucial typo from the print version fixed, accuracy fans!

POLE – 2 (Kiff SM) 

The great paradox of dub is that it sounds simultaneously cosmically other-worldly, and entirely organic. For all the toms that sound like they’re being played inside Krakatoa, or the hi-hats that sound like they’re being beamed in from Venus, you can never forget the physical input required to make this music: fingers pushing faders, hands leaping between dials, tape spooling in a battered Echoplex. Although there were plenty of decent records produced in the early 90s’ European digidub micromovement, the slick computer effects lack this earthy ruggedness. A few years later, Stefan Betke, AKA Pole, managed to rough up the smooth digital sheen, not with analogue equipment, but by using a digital device that was lightly shafted (the act name comes from something called a Waldorf 4-pole filter which Betke dropped on the floor, and which started going all wobbly). 

Opener ‘Fahren’ sounds most like Pole's digidub predecessors, and the synth melodica line recalls early Zion Train, but although the music is spacious it is neither ominous nor groovy. You might rightly call this dispassionate clinical music “cavernous”, but it sounds like a surveyor mapping a Victorian culvert, rather than someone lost in a haunted cave. ‘Stadt’ opens with plenty of hisses and crackles, and is superficially similar to the glitch music found on Mille Plateaux records around the same time, but it still manages to retain the ghost of a reggae riddim. 

‘Streit’ opens with a squitty little rhythmic twitch, the sound of a salivatory gland wired up to a dot matrix printer. Theres a slithering two-note bassline worming through the track, but again, you’d be hard pressed to skank to this one. There are equally unrhythmic strands of percussive noises on ‘Huckepack’ (which apparently means piggyback in German, but in my mind it will always be the Teutonic variant of vintage dance craze the hucklebuck). Here a tiny recurrent strand of pips – not so much a motif, more a tic – sounds a lot like someone unzipping a tent. 

Other ersatz sounds are the highly treated drum noise on ‘Hafen’ whcih sounds like a piece of cardboard coughing, and the pseudo-organ stabs that hang in off-beat clouds on ‘Weit’ so that listening feels like pushing one’s way through a forest of sere, dead bullrushes that crumble at the touch, whilst higher-pitched notes hang like zombie mosquitoes just out of reach. Except, you know, pleasant. Although the four albums Pole made in this style sound like a dead end now, an evolutionary avenue that died out whilst a more dominant strain mutated into dubstep a few years later and eclipsed its cousins, there’s still more than enough to intrigue on this record, arguably the pick of the four. This is music that doesn’t sound human, but equally doesn’t sound cold and regimented like most music that celebrates its lack of humanity. Warm yet impersonal, flawed yet robotic, there’s nothing else that sounds quite like this on my shelves.