Berliner Stefan Betke's deceptively simple layering of deep bass, ghostly synth echoes and the crackle of a malfunctioning Waldorf Pole filter fused postmodern digital "glitch" music with analog music tradition, brilliantly channeling the form and texture of Jamaican dub into abstract ambient music. Tracks like "Fremd" and "Tanzen" have the familiar elastic rhythm of reggae, with bits of static and barely audible keyboard bubbles doing the work of drums and guitars, but Pole's reference points are usually more subtle than that.

More on Pole in my weblog

Downloads: Pole Live @ Midem 54mb

• tinyurl.com

Pole live @ inedit 62 mb

• tinyurl.com

Stefan Betke, owner of ~scape and musician under the name of pole, has released two new MP3 files on his websites. Both of them reflect the hip hop influence in his new releases. The first file is "Pole feat. Fat Jon - Back Home" availible in high and very high quality. The second file from a new release on ~scape: "Bus feat. MC Soom-T - keep life right"

Bus, driven by Berliners Daniel Meteo and Tom Thiel, skirt the borderline between dub and hiphop, handing the board mike to Glaswegian MC Soom-T. En route, Dabrye from Ann Arbor/Detroit short-circuits the electrified fence.

Downloads:

• MP3: Pole - Back Home
  
• MP3: Bus - Keep life right

<img src="www.antville.org"align="left" hspace="3">With plenty of musical history and an unfettered passion for contemporary club tracks Stefan Betke aka Pole is probably best known for his minimal dub sounds between the clicks and cuts of modern electronica.

While the origins of Pole hail back to the summer of 1996, when he accidentally dropped his near legendary "Walldorf 4-Pole" filter (which, in its newly damaged state, began to generate seductively unpredictable crackles), Betke’s musical playing field covers a much broader spectrum. More

Links:

• Allmusic.com on Pole
  
• Reviews and a interview at the milkfactory.co.uk
  
• metacritic.com on his new album + Lots of links
  
• German interview on his new CD "Pole"
  
  
• pole-music.com, official homepage with lot's of dj-sets
  
• ~scape, his label
  
  Downloads:
  - MP3: Pole - Strand
  
• Lots of 30 Second Real Audio Clips