Name: Stefan Betke aka Pole
Nationality: German
Occupation: Producer, mastering engineer, DJ, live performer
Current Release: Earlier this year, Pole released his new full-length studio album Tempus. Now, he is following that release up with a new EP of remixes by Sleaford Mods, Rrose, and Alessandro Cortini.

[Read our Alessandro Cortini interview]

If you enjoyed this Pole interview and would like to stay up to date with Stefan Betke's music, visit his official website. He is also on Instagram, Facebook, and Soundcloud.

To dive even deeper into Stefan's approach and processes, we recommend our earlier Pole interview.



The first four Pole albums were created within a very short period. Then there was a long break, and now two albums have come out in quick succession. Is this due to Covid? Or is there another reason for this uptake in productivity?

It's somewhat related to Covid. When I was busy with the trilogy, there was no Covid, but I was still forced to stay at home and spend more time in the studio. I had already finished the blue album, and the red one was halfway done before my touring started. After I got to play live more, I was on the road every weekend. So, I had about one and a half albums in advance. I has to push myself to create the yellow album because we were on an annual release schedule.

With the new releases Tempus and Fading, it was a different story. I wrote Fading before Corona and originally planned to tour with it, which would have prevented me from immediately returning to the studio. Then Covid happened, and suddenly I had two more years. So, I just said, "Well, instead of sitting in front of the TV, I might as well make a new album." That's why it happened quickly. But I also got really excited about working on it as well.

Now, I do want to play live gigs for the new album, but only in places which make for a good fit with the music. It's quite complex, and I think people at a club will want to hear something different at 2:00 am in the night than this relatively calm music.

Maybe at 6:00 am.

Yes, exactly, at 6 it works. But I'm not much of an early riser.

There were references to the first Pole albums on Fading, and on Tempus, you again make use of broken equipment. What is it about this idea of working with delapidated gear – one of my favorite pieces by Tangerine Dream, "Thru Metamorphic Rock," famously relies on a blown transistor in the mixing console.

[Read our Tangerine Dream interview]

I must say, to be fair, that the idea of using errors is not new. Besides what you just mentioned, Brian Eno also described that he only really liked many of his productions if some device was malfunctioning, and he just let it run that way. Microstoria would do the same with CD read errors. After a while, they simply marked the CDs with lines using a marker, played them to see what errors would result, and then they recorded it.



I never read the manual for a synthesizer. I just use it. Back in the days, you couldn't save synthesizer settings; you had to start from scratch with the Minimoog and others. I've always been interested in letting chance play a role. At the same time, I'm a perfectionist. So, I carefully consider whether to allow the error or not. The real art lies in recognizing the quality of the error.

That's how it was with the famous broken filter during the trilogy. It was lying on the mixing desk for weeks, crackling. I kept trying to program a beat with it for the blue album. I thought everything was great, but it didn't really convince me. It was more like conventional dub-techno, and I precisely didn't want that. At some point, I turned off the 808 and accidentally triggered that crackling filter ... and it broke. Then I thought, oh ****, now I have to get it repaired ...

I left the studio, and when I came back, it was still crackling. Only THEN did I realize that it could be something valuable if I could manage to somehow integrate it sonically into the music. So, I started playing around with it, made room for a crackling filter and removed some things.



It was the same with Tempus. The Minimoog was dying. I really had to get it repaired because I need it for my bass lines; it has to work. But just before the oscillator finally died because the power supply broke, the siren on "Stechmück" was created. That's why that section has this wobbling character. It was actually a bass line it was playing, but then it turned into this weird cat-like screeching.



Many musicians today try to generate such things through software and apps.

The best letter I ever received was from a Japanese fan who said he had bought s total of four Waldorf Pole filters. He'd smashed them against the wall to break them ... and still they wouldn't do what they did for me. (laughs)

Yours is still broken.

It's still broken, and it will remain broken. It appeared on Fading once because it was about forgetting. It was a reference to the trilogy, which was re-released at the same time as Fading. But it's not on the new one, no.

Can you say something about the jazz references? I read jazz plays a role on the new material in the press release but don't quite hear it.

It's deconstructed in the same way as my dub references. The blue album had nothing to do with reggae, but everyone still called it a dub album.

The jazz reference on Tempus can be heard, for example, on the opener "Cenote." In terms of tonality, it's based on dominant seventh chords that are never played to the end because I don't actually want to be a jazz musician. It's just intended to suggest a direction.



Then there's the structure of how the tracks are built, how the drums come in; they sound relatively acoustic. I put a lot of emphasis on making them sound the way they do. Hopefully, next year we'll play some shows with a real drummer. The way the drums are programmed, where they come in and what they're playing is, in an extended sense, a reference to jazz.

I wouldn't compare it to John Coltrane or Miles Davis. But when my record boss heard Tempus after I played it for him, he said it's a mix of Jimi Hendrix and Miles Davis, which I couldn't quite grasp. But I know what he means: the structural work from jazz and the quirkiness and the electronic part from Jimi Hendrix. Electronics meet acoustic? Or jazz meets experimentation?

In reality, I'm heavily influenced by Jon Hassell, with whom I've worked a lot. I mastered many of his records in recent years before he sadly passed away. I also contributed keyboards to one of his albums. The way he approached jazz really excited and inspired me.



The self-titled Pole album from 2003 was also a musical bridge – not to jazz, but rather towards hip-hop. What is your perspective on that album today?

I still think the album is good. It's not among the best I've ever made, but I stand by it. The reason I made it was a kind of coming to terms with the past. I used to be an MC in a hip-hop band in Cologne, and I have a bit of a hip-hop background, but it's more jazz-influenced, like A Tribe Called Quest, etc. So, I thought it was important to do it myself.

I'm a bit unhappy with the album because the circumstances under which it was created were not ideal. After the trilogy, Mute signed me. When I had almost finished the album - which was quite a bit different from this hip-hop album - my father passed away, and I deleted the entire work.

It took me a long time to return to music and start recording again, and suddenly there was time pressure because the deadlines were getting closer. Long story short, there are certain elements on the album that I didn't fully think through or didn't articulate. There could have been more done; it's kind of halfway there.

But there are still great tracks on it. "Green Is Not Green - Yellow," for example, is, in my opinion, a classic. If you give the track a chance and immerse yourself in it, I think it's quite good. Fat Jon makes total sense on the album, and we played the album live together for two more years. I often played altered, reworked versions of it, and it actually got better.



At some point, I thought that the live concerts, although they were still recognizable as the album, were definitely more mature than the album itself. But I wouldn't want to remove it from my catalog.

During that time, there was a strong exchange between electronic music and hip-hop in many German cities. The influence of house music on hip-hop was significant, even here in Berlin. And this album turned that around. I found that fascinating, and no one else dared to do it. That's what makes this album so unique.

I'm glad you see it that way. I really just wanted to push it more in that direction. It got stuck halfway.

There are also instrumental versions of certain tracks, and there's a reason why Fat Jon isn't on all tracks. It wasn't a sales trick to keep pushing new material onto the market. I wanted to show that this music works in a different context too.

And when Jon didn't have time to play live, I still played the tracks exactly the same way—except that suddenly, the dub element became huge, and I turned it into reggae again. In a way.

The drums on the album also sound unique and they're different on each track.

It was the first time in a while that I'd used an MPC 2000 again.

[Read our feature on the MPC]

Its shuffle is different, it quantizes differently, it emphasizes things differently. And if, for example, you sample a kick drum from an 808 or 909 with the MPC, it has a different energy than when it comes from the original device.

[Read our feature on the Roland Tr-909]

On Tempus, I almost suspected that the drums were played by hand, on some tracks. They sound artificially organic and very fresh.

I would have liked to play them myself. Unfortunately, I can't play the drums. And I'm too restless to find a drummer who can play it for me. When I have an idea in my head, I have to implement it immediately. So, the sounds are coming from rhythm machines that I layered on top of each other and then played on the MPC by hand without quantization. But it's still a sampling technique.

What I wanted to achieve with Tempus was to make it more compact than Fading and more focused. You called it "fresh" earlier, I would perhaos say "alive." I wanted it to be a bit more jittery, to leap out of the speakers and leave you feeling: this thing is alive, it's moving.

It's not techno, but it has a bit of a connection to it again.

I agree. It's also in the nature of the subject. Dementia is not necessarily a topic you associate with loud techno music. So, Fading was more restrained in that sense.



But it was also the first attempt to introduce something new into my biography after several years, and you have to experiment a bit.

Why do you think it's even possible to articulate deeper topics like dementia with instrumental music?

Music, at its core, was originally just the imitation of real sounds. The piccolo flute was meant to imitate birds, and timpani were intended to mimic thunder. Instruments were developed to represent nature.

It's certainly easier to convey a specific theme if you have a singer or vocalist. However, you can convey the meaning of the words within instrumental music as well. It's extremely challenging, and I don't know if I succeeded; I can only really tell years later. That's why instrumental music often requires an accompanying text, liner notes or press release.

But I find it fascinating that you might hear the album very differently from me. The diversity of interpretations in instrumental music is incredibly interesting.