Good news: Pole's new album doesn't really sound anything like his last, 2003's self-titled effort for Mute. Even better news: It sounds even less like his early work. In one fell swoop, Pole-- Berlin studio mastermind and ~scape label proprietor Stefan Betke-- has slipped the yoke of early classics and mid-career questing alike, resulting in an album that brims with ideas and vitality but is utterly unique.
A quick recap. Pole-- Betke's fourth album, and his sole longplayer for Mute, after a long run with Germany's Kiff, which licensed his material to Matador in the U.S.-- marked a concerted effort by Stefan Betke to escape the omnipresent signature of 1, 2, and 3, the classic trilogy in which he proposed and perfected an idea of gurgling, crackling dub reductionism built of little more than sigh and suggestion. Flirting with hip-hop and a newly aerated sound, Pole succeeding in escaping what Mark Richardson, writing in Pitchfork, described as the "cul de sac" of the artist's calcifying style, but only at the expense of the kind of coherence and cohesion that had marked his efforts until that point. He had to try something, of course. The first three records were brilliant, dredging the sedimented floor of third-hand ideas of dub passed from sources like Seefeel's "isolationist" ambient music and Chain Reaction's shimmering "heroin house"-- and running the sludge through a rickety pipeline of busted filters and loose wires. But no matter how much mica (and who knows, gold) flecked his gloriously gunky stuff, there were only so many ways he could take it: even the most astonishing builders of sand castles are, ultimately, constrained by their materials.
Steingarten is still based upon dub reggae, from its loping rhythms to its revolving-door chord changes to traditional reggae staples like melodica and waxy analog delay. There's still plenty of fizz in the margins, too, though it no longer defines the shape of the songs. You can kinda sorta hear a glimmer of hip-hop in the opening cut, though thankfully there's no vocalist this time out, and two of the tracks here-- the back-to-back "Düsseldorf" and "Jungs"-- absorb the ubiquitous tick-tocking of Berlin minimal techno. But despite a continuity of influence, the sound of Pole's production-- its very heft-- is completely and refreshingly new.
This time out, Pole has reconfigured his relationship with gravity. Where before the music felt held together (and sometimes held down) by the weight of history-- both the music's and the musician's-- and the massing sound itself, here the individual parts hang together easily, as if brought together by chance and left bobbing in each other's orbits. The music is full of empty space, though it's not the insistent absence of minimalism-- more like the languid silence between two lovers who know when speech is moot. You can hear it in the opening track, "Warum", where every instrument-- from the aerosol shaker to the handclaps that crack like coals burning low-- stakes out its space in the mix, ceding the middle ground to... well, to nothing at all, really. There's just a wide swathe of ground, inviting you to stand there, stretch out and touch the sounds around you. It's certainly one of the most welcoming approaches to mixing and mastering I've heard.
The other big update this time out is the addition of noise-- not the blasted scree of Merzbow but an agreeable skronk sourced from muted guitar feedback and weeping tremolo. From the tube-amp uprising caught on "Winkelstreben" to the way he hammers at the guitar strings pulled taut below the bridge, it sounds like Betke was listening to Sonic Youth's Evol while recording Steingarten. It would be appropriate if it were true, given that this album represents the most important evolution in Pole's career.
More than anything, Steingarten is a remarkably easy-going album. Like all great recordings, it opens up over time, yielding fresh discoveries with repeat listens, but it hardly guards its secrets. You can hear the simplest kind of joy in the way (in "Düsseldorf") a high-pitched, pinging note run through delay begins gradually to throb out of time with the rhythm track. The opposing shapes and textures in "Winkelstreben" create totally unexpected convergences-- improbable harmonies on a par with those found in the best abstract painting or Japanese fashion. Full of resonant, glistening, almost tangible sounds, Steingarten is a synaesthetic's dream; I find myself continually running up against the limits of my own descriptive powers in trying to tackle its pear-shaped bass drops, its corrugated ambient underpinnings, its frog-throated choruses.
By contemporary standards, this is a short album: nine songs, 45 minutes. It takes guts to hold oneself to such meager numbers after a four-year hiatus, but Betke got it absolutely right: there's not a note out of place on this thing, not a single thread of delay that overstays its welcome. Steingarten is a nearly perfect album. Putting the melancholic "Pferd" last is just another of the record's successes; it makes the whole thing feel like a kind of meditation on the very nature of limits and limitations. Given the history of his Pole project, that's likely something Betke has mulled over plenty. Here, with inscrutable agility-- like the mechanics of meditating upon a Zen koan-- he moots the whole issue and achieves something very much like a state of grace.
