(Photo by Ben de Biel) Pole (aka Stefan Betke) has shared “Rost”, a brand new track and the first to be shared from “Tanzboden”, a 2-track 12” due out on Mute on 13 August 2021 on vinyl and digitally.

The new track originates from a series of loops created during the recording sessions for his first new album for Mute in over 15 years, “Fading”, which was released in November 2020. Fading was about loss of memory and how memory disappears over the years as we grow older, and these loops were discovered when Betke had returned to the original recordings.

He explains: “I began working in my Berlin Studio, doing research and listening to the single recording sessions of Fading to remember what I did exactly and to find out what I think about the recording months after finishing it. Tanzboden is an old fashioned word for a dancefloor constructed during the harvest time, mostly outdoors, and Rost is the German word for rust which is an interesting connection to Tanzboden. If the dancefloor is not really used for a long time anymore it starts to rust, and as the screws and metal plates which are holding the wooden parts together disappear slowly over the years, so does the Tanzboden itself.”

You can listen to the track below.

About Pole

Pole is the artistic name of Stefan Betke, a German electronic music artist commonly associated with the glitch genre as well as dubtronica. Born in Düsseldorf, Pole took his name from a Waldorf 4-Pole filter, which he accidentally dropped and broke in 1996. Betke found the strange hissing and popping noises the filter now made interesting sounds. He then began using the broken filter to create music, launching his musical career.

Betke’s first four albums, titled “1”, “2”, “3”, and “R” (an intentional trilogy of albums, followed by a collection of remixes of Pole’s 1998 debut EP “Raum”), were all based around this filter, with songs usually taking the form of dub bass-lines and rhythms with percussion provided by the eponymous filter.

In 2003 Betke departed from this style for the album “Pole” (a combination of tracks from two EPs, “45/45” and “90/90”), which utilized more traditionally electronics.

Pole has been distributed on several different labels, including Matador Records and Mute Records, and in 1999 Betke co-founded (with Barbara Preisinger) the label ~scape, also known for publishing Jan Jelinek. On September 1, 2011, Betke founded a new artist label named Pole.

For the synthpoppers out there, Betke oversaw the 2021 re-master of Alphaville’s 1989 album “The Breathtaking Blue” alongside Bernhard Lloyd.