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“This is a natural development to the last album,” says Pole’s Stefan Betke. “One which goes further and is even more complex.”
2020’s acclaimed album Fading, from the pioneering German electronic artist – who also re-released the era-defining trilogy 1,2,3 that year – was about coping with dementia and the loss of memory over time. Betke’s follow up, Tempus, is an album that considers the connection between the past, present and future.
It’s a natural topic to explore, not only because of the connection it clearly has with the themes explored on Fading, but because all of Pole’s work has an interconnectedness that spans past, present, and future. While each Pole album – his catalogue glides across ambient, dub, jazz, glitch, and electronica – is distinctly singular in its own right, the albums are part of an ongoing evolution that link as much to history as they do to the future. “My work is based on keeping elements from the past and developing them into the here and now,” Betke says. “It’s always based on trying to expand my musical language, so you will always find old elements but you will always find new. This is a step forward from Fading, and is connected to it, but it is also connected to all of my records.”
Musically, the album is also one that avoids easy categorisation, and Tempus exists in a unique space. The production is rich and enveloping, exuding dense yet crisp atmospherics on the opening ‘Cenote’, with drum sounds so punchy and dynamic you’d be forgiven for mistakenly thinking Betke was playing a real kit. This striking balance between complexity and compactness continues throughout.
As ever, the presence of dub within Betke’s idiosyncratic framework of electronic music, is a constant. However, its function perhaps takes on a more significant role in the context of this record. The dub effect units used in Pole’s music delay sound, keeping them a step behind the present before they are released and then they fade away again into a foggy reverb. The pace, tone and echo of dub effects are themselves traversing the essence of past, present and future within the album.
It’s also one of the most overtly jazz-leaning records in Betke’s career. However, given his inclination to do things originally, it’s a kind of deconstructed, mutated and manipulated form of jazz. The sparse drums and weaving basslines of ‘Alp’ possess an almost industrial jazz tone, while the closing ‘Allermannsharnisch’, with understated yet striking keys hovering over crisp beats, veers into a subtle yet experimental jazz territory.
However, despite the neatly executed concept and nuanced themes that run through the record, Betke is still willing to embrace mistakes and accidents. In the same way all his records connect, they also share the accidental feel that gave birth to the project as a whole (Pole being named after a broken Waldorf 4-Pole filter that gave him such a distinct sound.) Here, on ‘Stechmück’, you hear a strange, eerie, almost unsettling wailing sound that rings out above the bass-heavy beats. “That is the sound of my dying Minimoog,” Betke says. But instead of re-recording it, he incorporated the sound of a failing piece of electronic equipment into the heart of the song, thus giving it an entirely new tonal dimension.
The painting on the cover, by Wolfgang Betke titled Großstadtwanderer, links into the themes explored on the album. “It’s oil on canvas and what I really like is that, in a very similar way, it is super complex like my music,” says Betke. “I found the whole atmosphere in this totally weird confused head with these little shimmery eyes leaking through the colours to totally fit the idea of Tempus.”
Pole’s ongoing musical evolution, while retaining a relationship to previous work, means that he is already naturally building an ever-stronger bridge between the present and the past. However, the deeply innovative sounds that he continues to carve and explore, and always breaking new ground with each record, means that bridge is also being extended far into the future.
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“It’s the sound of me grappling with transformation,” says Nicolas Bougaïeff of his latest album Begin Within.
The Berlin-based, Canadian artist’s last album Begin Within embodies huge musical and personal evolution, with Bougaïeff plunging deep to explore parts of himself, and his craft, that he has never before. The album title itself speaks volumes of this journey. “If you want to transform the world you have to start by transforming yourself,” he says.
Recent time spent on reflection and introspection quickly began to manifest in his work. “I paused what I was doing and re-examined what it all meant,” he says. “I took the occasion to do introspective work and it really helped me sort out issues I was grappling with personally. Both these parts of my life kept on being intertwined but rather than being intertwined in a mass ball of confusion and chaos, it got intertwined in a slow, isolated, self reflective, meditative process.”
While The Upward Spiral, his 2020 debut for Mute, explored the kind of thumping industrial techno that could be heard in the clubs he was regularly frequenting, on Begin Within he’s opened up entirely new sonic terrain, including the use and experimentation of his voice as an instrument.
The role of voice is a key one to the album in a dual capacity. Not only does it add a new dimension and dynamic to the shape, tone and groove of the record but it’s also symbolic of Bougaïeff quite literally finding his own. “There’s a few major themes with this album and honesty is one of them,” he says. “I went through years of physical and emotional masochism as a kind of immersive shock therapy to jolt me into understanding something. I was putting myself in evermore abrasive positions, physically and emotionally, to promote myself into feeling something or figuring something out. But I never knew what, it was just a very foggy instinct. I was creating scenarios that eventually got out of my control.”
He continues: “I lost myself to a degree and Begin Within was the beginning of a process of mental reconciliation and internal unity manifested in my art. I was looking for expansion and honesty, for an ability to recognise, respect and articulate my emotions and put them into words. Speaking on this level is not something I was able to do before. I felt like I was missing a basic human capacity. So I was looking to engage with others and myself on this level and vanquish detachment. That was already hard enough to start doing in real life so it was a real challenge to do that in my music with lyrics and words. Getting into songwriting was a real stretch.”
The vocal element also allowed him to explore personal stories and narratives that he had previously been unable to. “Another major theme is ‘intimate Berlin stories’,” he says. “It’s about several breakups, some recent, some not so. I opened myself up emotionally and I learned to speak about my emotions. It may sound strange but this was just something that I didn’t do.” Perhaps these intimate Berlin stories are most perfectly captured in the poignancy of tracks like ‘Pain Goes Away’, which uses field recordings from nights out -including locations such as the Berghain bathroom – that merge with a groggy and murky beat to recreate such crepuscular adventures.
Bougaïeff’s voice features on every track. Sometimes it’s distorted and treated as it coalesces into fractured beats, while at other times it’s more obvious and clear – as on tracks such as ‘Naked Eye’, which fuses a mangled, and almost hip-hop-like beat, with a seamless vocal melody. Musically the album is an eclectic one, veering from glitchy IDM to immersive ambient, and from experimental pop to jagged electronica. The sound of transformation, both musical and personal, is something that is inescapable. The opening ‘Every Day’ being a bold statement of a new artist at work trying to reach new levels. “‘Every Day’ is a stream of consciousness edit,” he says. “Every previous step was deleted. There are no previous versions, so the only version of the track that exists is the one that’s released.”
For the first time in his life Bougaïeff – a hugely experienced composer who has studied electroacoustic composition and has a doctorate on minimal techno – decided to put his least experienced skills to the forefront of this project. “I’m not a writer, that’s not my thing,” he says. “I put the part of the art that was my weakest point, the most foreign, first. So that was the first big way to force me to focus on the emotional aspect rather than on technique. When I got to the nitty gritty and I had to call upon my production composer skills to pull it all together, I did my best to put my bag of techniques at the service of the emotions, it was a supporting skill.”
However, despite being an album rooted in emotion, personal transformation and communicating new feelings that goes to a place that transcends just music, it’s still an incredibly smartly crafted piece of work. “On ‘Begin Within’, the beginning is in the middle, and the music radiates out from there, so if you listen to the title track in forward and reverse it’s the exact same thing. Inner Pattern is a polytemporal locked groove in the first half, which unfolds in the second half.”
The process of making the album is one that has gone beyond simply a creative process and instead has been inescapably intertwined with a profound period of personal change on a life-changing level. “The experience was transformative and mind-bending,” Bougaïeff says. “It was like there’s an entire dimension of the human experience that was closed off to me that I didn’t even know existed.”
