Bleep

At its core, Pole’s Fading LP adheres to dub-techno’s principle style as laid down by the likes of Basic Channel. This is an album of deep sonics where low murmurs of sub-bass and crisp programmed drums wend away beneath foggy atmospheres. However, whereas many artists use such timbres to create DJ tools, Pole’s compositional style is more idiosyncratic. Project mastermind Stefan Betke slows the rhythms down from club speed to a more stately strut on many of these tracks, a choice which both allows the listener to get lost in these tracks and also gives Betke the time and space to try out some innovative compositional approaches.

A few tracks on Fading have a distinct flavour of Jan Jelinek’s micro-looping house sound, while the bright digital harmonics and squeaky glitching that fleck the corners of the record draw from both the raster-noton discography and Oval’s experiments. Furthermore, the album’s passages of pregnant, hissing ambience place it alongside Wolfgang Voigt’s Gas project and the softer end of Skee Mask. All of this is brought together for a quietly beguiling record, one where deft, detailed production creates the sort of supreme deep-listening experience that people have come to Pole forever since the project emerged in the late-1990s.

Pole’s Fading is another masterful set of dub-techno innovations from Stefan Betke’s long-running project.