Wald marks a new beginning—maybe even a new new beginning—for Pole, the solo alias of the Berlin producer and mastering engineer Stefan Betke. It is his first album in seven years, and its predecessor, Steingarten, was itself a kind of reboot. Early on in the Pole project, Betke was remarkably productive: In just six years he recorded five albums, and the first three of those were instant classics, despite the fact that they were all essentially variations on the same theme—an alchemical fusion of dub bass and static crackle. But with albums four and five, as Betke sought to escape the strictures of his own signature, he seemed to find only detours rather than a viable way forward (2001's R, featuring remixes from Burnt Friedman and Kit Clayton, has held up rather well; 2003's Pole, featuring the rapper Fat Jon, has not). A four-year break followed, and it must have done him good, because Steingarten, in 2007, was among the best work of his career. Abandoning the midrange murk and omnipresent white noise in favor of crisp sounds, elastic rhythms, and vast space, it felt like vacuum-sealed krautrock, and as a celebration of texture and tone color, it was exhilarating.
Perhaps Betke's unwillingness to repeat himself explains why he followed Steingarten with yet another extended silence, one broken only in 2011 with a trio of EPs, Waldgeschichten (German for Forest Stories). That title, like Wald, refers to the walks in the woods where Betke apparently looked for inspiration. That image may bring to mind Wolfgang Voigt's Gas project, whose foggy swirls of classical samples were inspired by the Black Forest and its role in German Romanticism. But the two artists' impressions of the woods couldn't be more different. Where Gas is either dark and claustrophobic or starlit and idyllic, Pole's Wald evokes porous thickets and branches stripped bare by the elements.
As is customary in his work, texture reigns supreme. Instead of melodies, there are clusters of tone—glassy drum-machine pings, brushed metal, scraped flint, the atonal shimmer of a guitar being strummed above the nut. In "Käfer", a junkyard guitar provides the semblance of a through-line across a landscape of crickets and electrical interference; a synthetic melodica takes the lead in "Moos (Live)", and wheezing organs lend both color and a viscous sense of substance to many of the album's tracks. Only in "Myzel" and "Fichte", whose chiming leads are faintly reminiscent of Autechre, does a melodic sensibility begin to creep back into the heavily abstracted landscape.
The three songs designated as "Live" aren't concert recordings, but live-in-the-studio updates of tracks previously released on the Waldgeschichten EPs. That method—recording in real time, both hands on the mixing desk—is Betke's enduring debt to dub. Those dub mechanics have a lot to do with the music's flexible rhythms and odd syncopations, which contribute to the mercurial sense of flow: There are almost always more elements in play than you can track, and whatever silvery filament you choose to focus on, your attention will soon be hijacked by something else. Still, there's nothing hectic about the listening experience; thanks to its relaxed pace and gently abstracted shapes, Wald is every bit as contemplative as the forest walks that inspired it. It has an unfettered sense of motion that, for an artist who was once, by his own admission, stuck in a rut, sounds like the sweetest kind of freedom.
