Pole - Tempus (2LP) - 45RPM

Pole records have a way of making a room feel bigger. Tempus, released in 2022 on Mute, doesn’t shout for attention. It hums and sighs and leaves air between every gesture, and that space becomes part of the music. Stefan Betke has been chasing that sensation since the late 90s, when a damaged filter gave him the famous crackle that defined his 1/2/3 trilogy. Time has sharpened his ear rather than softened it. Coming after 2020’s Fading, an album haunted by memory, Tempus turns the lens to time itself. You hear it in the drift, in the way rhythms seem to emerge from the floorboards and dissolve before you can name them.

Betke’s roots are well known. He co-founded the ~scape label and runs Scape Mastering, and that attention to sonic grain is the quiet engine of Tempus. The bass feels sculpted. Kicks barely brush the surface, yet somehow carry the whole structure. Highs are a whisper, but they cut exactly where they need to. It is dub at its most reduced, not a reference to Jamaica so much as a method. Everything is subtraction until only the necessary remains. Listen on headphones and there is a sense of rooms within rooms. Put it on speakers and the walls turn to fabric that flutters with each pulse.

The album’s title is literal. These pieces linger on decay tails, on the time a filter takes to close, on the weight of a single chord held for a bar longer than expected. There are no fireworks. The drama is in restraint. Percussion arrives like a change in the weather. A bassline leans into a note and then lets it fall into silence. Little environmental details slip through, that old Pole fascination with texture that could be vinyl dust or electricity flicker or a synth at the edge of self-noise. It’s easy to over-intellectualize this kind of minimalism, but Tempus carries a physical pull that keeps you from drifting into theory. It nods the head at late-night tempos and lets your thoughts wander just far enough.

If you care about sound, Tempus vinyl is the way to meet this record. Betke’s low end takes real shape on a turntable, and the quiet passages gain that slight room-breath only records give back. I spun a copy in a Melbourne record store and watched a few shoppers pause halfway down the aisle, unsure if the building’s air conditioning had just shifted. That is the record working. For anyone hunting Pole vinyl or thinking to buy Pole records online, this one rewards the purchase in a very tactile way. It also sits beautifully next to earlier Pole albums on vinyl, a through line from the brittle miles of the trilogy to the weathered glow of his recent work.

Tempus feels like a conversation with the past rather than a nostalgia trip. You can hear Basic Channel’s shadow in the negative space, and maybe a distant kinship with Jan Jelinek’s grainy loops, but Pole never sounds like anyone else. The harmonic language is sparse and modern. The rhythms flirt with dub techno, then step sideways into something more private. That is part of the charm. This is club music cooled to body temperature, perfect for closing hours or the first hour of a set when you need to make the room exhale.

Context matters with Pole, and so does patience. Betke has talked often about process and attention, about the value of listening for what happens when you take elements away. Tempus honors that ethos without feeling like a museum piece. It’s alive in small motions. The best moments arrive when you realize a sound you thought was decorative has been carrying the whole arrangement for minutes, and then it slips out and the floor tilts. Those little reveals keep the record from melting into wallpaper.

For crate diggers and ambient-minded dub heads, this is an easy recommendation. If you are browsing vinyl records Australia wide, keep an eye out, and if your local doesn’t have it, most shops can source it quickly. Tempus is the kind of album that deepens with each play. It holds the room in a calm way, and it has that Pole quality that makes time pass oddly. You look up, the side is over, and somehow you feel lighter.