Pole

Berlin-based producer/electronic musician Stefan Betke worked closely with the dub-informed techno label Basic Channel before releasing music of his own under the name Pole. His sounds were derived from and named after a less-than-perfectly functional sound-processing device called the 4-Pole Filter. Running his skeletal, bass-heavy tracks through the filter produced random clicks and crackles, adding a thick atmosphere of mystery and unpredictability to the minimal compositions. Betke's earliest work as Pole surfaced as a series of 12" singles in the late '90s, but it developed from its noisy, spare beginnings on subsequent and more ornately rendered albums like 2022's Tempus.