With plenty of musical history and an unfettered passion for contemporary club tracks Stefan Betke aka Pole is probably best-known for his minimal dub sounds between the clicks and cuts of modern electronica.
While the origins of Pole hail back to the summer of 1996 when he accidentally dropped his near-legendary "Waldorf 4-Pole" filter (which, in its newly damaged state, began to generate seductively unpredictable crackles) Betke’s musical playing field covers a much broader spectrum. An active remixer, label owner, musician, DJ, mastering engineer, promoter, studio owner and producer, all of Betke’s outlets are governed by his urge to distil the substance of sounds and ideas, irrespective of any scenes. For Betke it’s the content which counts, rarely the environment it was generated in.
Besides ~scape, the label he founded in 1999 together with Barbara Preisinger, he runs a music publishing company (~scape publishing), produces acts like Barbara Morgenstern and remixes tracks from Egoexpress to Depeche Mode.
Like many other producers and musicians the Berlin-based artist also fills clubs, radio shows and festival stages with his DJ sets, but Betke is no DJ in the traditional sense. Until recently, he used to create entirely new productions from scratch. To cut a new groove from his favourite sounds he would combine two turntables, two CD-players and a laptop, then juxtapose jazz and dub with a little Steve Reich thrown in, up to the point where four tracks were simultaneously fighting for attention, to then be re-sampled and mixed on his laptop. Nowadays Betke makes do with a more conventional set-up and builds his sets around experimental hiphop and electronica.
(Official Biography by Scape)
