- Stefan Betke's productions as Pole tend to be measured and precise almost to a fault. Still, recent years have seen Betke on a fine run of form with the Wadgeschichten ("Forest Stories") series: a project that explores a characteristically austere but beautiful click'n'cut dub aesthetic, dusted with the occasional desolate field recording and clouds of breathy synth work.
In Dubs sees Betke remix Swedish synth drone duo Roll The Dice, versioning three tracks from last year's In Dust, a soot-stained meditation on heavy industry and the alienating effects of hard labour. If recent Pole releases have been appealing for their stark, wintry clarity, the murkiness of Betke's source material here was always going to yield different results. The version of "The Skull Is Built into the Tool" is the most spacious, the track's central motif hollowed out, made tremulous and left to waft delicately over a dry dub chassis. Later on, delicate swabs of texture culled from the original loop churn in the background, sounding abrasive but also eminently controlled.
Elsewhere, though, textures are thicker and percussion more buried, with mixed results: "Calling Dub Workers" transfigures a gloomy dirge into something lighter, but sits in ambivalent stasis for much of its length. The throbbing "Echo Hands," meanwhile, is given a lazy swing, Betke refashioning fragments of piano and guitar into a skank of sorts—though the whole thing hangs together only tentatively, each element wreathed in negative space and half-untethered from the grid.
Tracklist A Calling Dub Workers
B1 Echo Hands
B2 The Skull Is Built Into The Version