Pole: CD1 & 2

With home recording technology becoming more efficient, affordable, and easy-to-use, cookie-cutter electronic music will continue to propagate. The temptation to just create instant records at the touch of a button is too great for many musicians: It takes a certain type of stubbornness to insist on making music that wrests control away from the machines. Berlin's Stefan Betke, who records as Pole, ingeniously constructs music made up of only the most minimal elements. Taking cues from such Jamaican dub masters as Lee "Scratch" Perry, Augustus Pablo, and King Tubby, Betke deconstructs the sound of a defective 4-Pole Waldorf Filter—an old-school analog noisemaker—then reassembles the various burps, pops, and hiccups into rhythmic compositions that serve as beds for subtle melodies and hypnotic bass lines. It's a technique reminiscent of such like-minded minimalists as Oval, though Betke's results are unique and appealing in their own right. Like the work of German studio giants Cluster and Harmonia, Pole's recordings work best as ambient music, but beneath the pretty surfaces lie the theories of musique concrete: Betke's gift is his ability to make otherwise non-musical organic sounds, like the crackle of static, seem accessible and evocative. As far as ambient music goes, CD1, a dense collage that never sounds cluttered, is near-perfect. CD2, a six-track EP, finds Betke playing up the songs over the technique. The disc is explicitly dubby and melodic, but it's no less impressive a piece of perfect minimalism than its essential predecessor.