CD2

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Stefan Betke shouldn't give up the day job. It informs his music in such unique fashion, one wonders what he'd do without the constant aural backdrop of needle on vinyl. In-house engineer at Berlin's Dubplates and Mastering, from which Basic Channel and others release their futurist meisterwerke, Betke clearly has a detailed understanding of the fundamental musical character of the recording process itself - crackles, buzzes, pops, scrapes, hisses. Or, what many less-inventive engineers spend their time trying to eliminate. CD2 (following last year's CD1, also under the pseudonym Pole) is an incredibly skilful construction of music from these originally (traditionally) non-musical elements, in which fragments of, well, raw texture spark and flash against a backdrop of ambient dub. Flavour of the month with the print media, probably due to an easy journalistic 'angle' on his modus operandi i.e. employing a broken Waldorf 4 Pole-Filter to provide much of the accidental composition, Pole's oblique rhythms and mechanistic timbres are undeniably attractive. Though there are antecedents in the surgical precision of Oval, Betke's work is more accessible essentially due to being so firmly rooted in dub, occasionally reminiscent of early Orb. Whilst Betke denies that dub is the primary force here, stating that Tubby et al were not necessarily his formative musical influences (he namechecks avant-jazz, rock and hiphop), both the sleepy but insistent forward motion and shuddering bass bodyblows glide through an unmistakably cavernous space. The textures here are solely electronic however, and the music is uncharacteristically melodic (for this genre). It'll be interesting to see where Betke goes next, as this particular musical formula may now be exhausted. Indeed, CD2 clocks in at a tidy 33mins and most of the tunes are variations on an (extremely seductive) theme. Still, essential listening for early 1999, and one really should get the big fat vinyl version of this release. Nice mastering ;)