pole: wald

"Wald begins immediately, ends abruptly, and is divided into three acts of three tracks each. It is the first studio album under Stefan Betke's Pole moniker in eight years... half an eternity in the digital age -- yet the pieces on Wald seem timeless, or to have fallen from time. Stefan Betke: 'After Steingarten I was on tour for two years. At the same time, Barbara Preisinger and I set up our record label ~scape. Those were two hindering circumstances that were not exactly conducive to a creative restart... I couldn't have really added anything new in the wake of Steingarten and the dub declensions I had made in previous years.'... Over several years, long walks in the woods preceded the resumption of the production of his own material: 'Walks through the Isar valley, but also through the forests in the Alps... You have to go through life with an open mind and with extended antennae. If something strikes you and inspires you to create new music, then it will be for a reason...' For Pole, it was the forest; its spatiality... manifested, for example, in raw sounds (second act) and in psychedelic structures (third act), which sound as if they might be guitars (but are actually distorted synthetic lines)... From the tangible experience of the forest, a rather abstract question emerges: 'How can I take what I have seen or felt and make it audible?' This question becomes a narrative, a storyline. The initial story is that Pole went into a dialogue with his instruments, and the second story can be heard in the three acts of Wald. The new compositions on Wald do not deny their inheritance within the continuum of dub, yet they bring an entirely new vocabulary to Pole's sonic and spatial universe... 'If Wald had nothing to do with the world of Pole, then I would have come up with a new alter ego and produced it under a new name.' The structures, forms, and processes that Betke perceived in the forest were translated into musical structures, forms, and processes that inherently sounded like Pole. Perhaps the forest simply produces reverberations (just like the echo in the mountains!) that give rise to a bounty of thoughts. The story behind it is told in music, without the use of words -- as has previously so often been the case with Pole." --Max Dax