Bleep

The legendary Stefan Betke has forged his own path of electronic music as Pole since 1998. With a rich and long spanning discography, there’s much room for nostalgia, but on his ninth full length album Tempus, Betke leans into something less yearning and more transformative. Following on from his previous album in 2020, Fading, which focussed on dementia and memory loss, Tempus leads with an omnipresent narration, where past, present, and future blend into each other.

Patience defines much of the album’s structure, where beats lumber onwards, deep in thought. There are moments of abstraction amongst the regularity of downstream dub rhythms, allowing the sounds to bring the concepts to life. ‘Stechmück’, translating to “mosquito” in English, features an incessant buzzing noise weaving in and out of cavernous, lively beats, perhaps like music from the past that haunts the present, continuously coming back and unable to be ignored. The title track, meanwhile, starts with what could pass as metallic guitar shreds amongst bustling rhythms, suddenly dropping out to highlight a single piano note, then all rebounding off of eachother in a temporal beat mixture.

The murky subterranean atmosphere of ‘Cenote’ tracks the molten arrow of time as it slowly marches, measured by robust drum hits and deep pits of bass. ‘Grauer Sand’ shifts as fine hi-hat grains trickle through the neck of an hourglass, falling into the dreamworld of ‘Alp’ with dub and jazz influences blurring together. A moment of relative calm appears on ‘Firmament’, with tiptoeing piano notes voicing doubt and curiosity, spiralling in an upward motion.

As a pioneer producer in his own corner of electronic music, Pole masterfully explores his sonic language on his most conceptual album yet.