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Stefan Betke knows dance music--he masters it all day long for Berlin's Basic Channel and Chain Reaction labels. But as Pole, the sounds he records are more suited to dancing in your head than on the floor. Betke works with extremely basic elements: bass, echo, and the omnipresent crackle of a Waldorf 4-pole filter (thus the name; FYI, filters are synthesizer components that filter out specified frequencies) that he dropped and broke. Samples of the cracked component's static emissions are the grainy irritants from which he creates lovely audio pearls. Betke's by no means the only electronic musician working with sonic glitches, but his knack for writing seductive, mysterious melodies makes him the most accessible one. Betke's tunes swirl in and out of deep, dubby rhythms likeAugustus Pablo's melodica, and pan around the stereo spectrum like swallows on speed.--Bill Meyer