This is the fourth in a series of concerts put on by that champion of all things avant-garde and electronic, the magazine the Wire. There are four sets tonight: digital jazzer Burnt Friedman teams up with krautrock's polyrhythmic hero, Jaki Liebezeit of Can; bassist Jah Wobble performs with saxophonist Evan Parker; Pole offers processed dub; and all the players return for a sort of electronica superjam.
It is Pole - 34-year-old Berliner Stefan Betke - who intrigues most. A DJ-musician with three albums to his credit, he is also a producer and remixer, owns the excellent ~Scape record label, stages the ~Scape night at Berlin's WMF club, runs a music publishing company and works as a CD-mastering engineer in his own recording studio.
It was while engineering that Betke acquired his performing name and discovered an alternative approach to music-making, when he heard the sounds made by a faulty piece of analogue equipment called the Waldorf 4-Pole filter - the spits, crackles, hisses and hums of technology on the blink. And so Pole became one of a new wave of artists on the fringes of dance making rhythmically interesting music out of machine glitches. Errors and malfunctions are amplified and organised to become an integral part of the experience.
Although in his open-neck shirt he isn't visually arresting, Pole commands attention. He moves busily between his Powerbook, MiniDisc player, keyboards and mixing desk, triggering programmed effects, playing a plaintive melody with one hand while arranging the sounds live with the other. What separates Pole from his peers is his devotion to King Tubby-style dub: the way he phases between right and left speakers is an old dub trick, as is the use of reverb, sustain, echo and delay.
As the giant bass pulse thuds relentlessly, the space around it is filled with and emptied of whorls and eddies, drones and detonations. Various noise particles fly in and out of the mix, bringing to mind all manner of intergalactic weather metaphors, images of meteorite showers or dustbowls on Mars. At one point, the clang of metal against metal reverberates around the sold-out hall, and it's like we're all wearing the most advanced headphones on this or any other planet, lost together in deep dub space, picking up the distress signals of a dying star.
