By: Case Harrison
Microtonality is a technical and artistic advancement in guitar music. It is where guitarists use the octaves on their instrument and divide them into extremely small intervals. It captures the hidden notes between the regular 12-note octaves in the guitar or any other pitch-bending instruments. While bands like King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard have popularized the method, creating albums based around microtonal functions, microtonality originated back at the start of the 1900s. Composers and MIDI synthesizers have been experimenting with the extension of tones and intervals for a long time and now in the 2020s, it is used in a slightly different chaotic lens. There is a noticeable comparison with the guitars of King Gizzard as they used it to bring a more psychedelic and progressive instrumentation, with multiple flows being formed creating fun and twisty melodies. Angine de Poitrine takes inspiration from microtonal music and instrumental rock music and marks a slightly newer step onto the field. What Angine De Portrine, the aliens from Quebec, do differently, is that they make the microtonality more aggressively crazy, bumping the quality of the drum and guitar into an intense playground of instrumental, improvisational action. They first reached popularity with their KEXP performance, which has now racked up 12 million views and it’s clear to see it’s because of the oddly attractive style they bring to the table. Angine De Poitrine plays with a doubleneck guitar + bass configuration, with multiple fretboards to create a widespread of microtonal waves of fast-playing notes, which the guitarist has skewered on with an actual saw, so you know they are serious about their octave experimentation. Talking about the band itself: they are a gimmick band, a duo named Khn, the one wearing the massive pyramid block as a head ornament with dollar signs for eyes, and Klem, the one wearing a long-tubed mask with a long dripping nose as a helmet. They wear polka dot uniforms and garments and they communicate by making triangles with their hands. Their third main instrument is a pedal board that controls the loops and melodies of the guitar powered by the pushing of Khn’s painted feet. The classification would proudly be determined as weird, but that weirdness lets them be a new fun and exciting band that are not bound by standard rock rules. Their costumes and set design are also based on dadaist and cubist art, where they rely on abstract geometric shapes as an immersive setting and bring in absurdness and even whimsicalness to the performance. The gimmick they create lets them elevate their identity and performance through their costumes and brings in the absurd theatrics to generate their own creative playground.
Every song from their new album, Vol. 2 as well as songs from their 2024 album, Vol. 1, are explosive and demanding attention to every rhythm change. With their own weird eccentricity, they create their own immaculate coolness with the sporadic rhythms that they mold together. The first song, “Fabienk,” starts off with an alienating riff, with a drum sound with every change of note. At the 1:30 mark, they do a war cry introducing a funkier guitar solo that is layered onto the abstract riffing. Then, the bass gets even gnarlier with the layered chords on minute two, and at the 3 minute mark, the amp dies down and changes into a new song. The tempo is more orderly as microtonal and 12-tone notes, bass and guitar, are mixing and looping into the upbeat drum tempo, showing off its eclectic technical production and most importantly, creating a listening experience that is energetically groovy.
The band wants you to be seriously engaged with the polyrhythms that they produce, to focus on their strange crafting of rhythm, like an artful mechanic showing what type of combined gadgets they conjured up in the tool shed. “Mata Zyklek” was the first song I listened to and the cartoony stops of the drum and bass turning into a progressive and fast-paced run hooked me in. Their unpredictable formations of melodies and harmonies are how they brought charm and charisma into the hearts of others. They are unrestraining in their guitar and drum work, combining different types of meters that are not common in the west and combining it into their microtonal rhythms. They also have a great talent of creating unpredictable guitar beats and still following through with a structural time signature. As David Bruce Composer has pointed out while analyzing the rhythms, even though the guitar stabs seem uncanny and out of nowhere in the song, they still actually follow the structure of a ⅝ beat, making it seamlessly graspable to the western listeners’ ears. Angine De Poitrine also worked out their skills of microtonality with the help of math rock, which features a lot more calculated time signatures and rhythms, ones that find the best notes to add together to make a great melody. The following track, “Sarniezz,” (british word for sandwiches, very important to know), fascinates me by how its guitar notes are very out of tune from each other, creating a distorted riffline with a drum pattern that ramps up the speed as the song charges forward, and still produces a captivating rhythm. Somehow, Angine De Poitrine made the equation wrong but got the answer right. It creates an uncertain, yet loose and jammy vibe like it was a jalopy slowly moving towards the hurling freeway while running from the cops. The beauty of having a gimmick as your identity and ignoring the normal rhythms of western music is that it allows the freedom to move notes around whenever they want. This is probably my favorite song on the album because of its boldly constructed passage of music and pacing. The vibe changes with the following track, “Utzp” which is a polka song. It mixes the high-marching tempo used in modern polka like Gogol Bordello with the microtonal fluidity of the guitar. Like all the rest, it kicks ass, especially toward the halfway point where it morphs into a metal progressive flow with fast-paced strumming mixed and loops of different chords playing. It’s like a steel train with how fast it ramps up.
One critique I have of this album is where it falls into a conventional rhythm, sometimes leaving nothing but the same microtonality we heard before. In an interview hosted by Aucard du Tours, they have said that one of their signature aspects in their songs is their looping and repetitiveness with the loop pedal, acting as a support system for replicating danceable polyrhythms. While the looping does work to its charm, it does sometimes lead to more duplicative patterns without any change. Take the song “Yor Zared,” which has 6 minutes of fast guitar playing and drumming, but the last minute is where the song actually shines as it strays from the narrative and puts in a more headbanging finish that makes it extremely satisfying to hear. However, I wished that part was incorporated more into the song and while the first five minutes are a really great beat, I felt that there was limited space in the construction of the bassline that leaves the guitar solos without any room to go to bolder places. “Angor” is probably the track that suffers the most from this tiny problem as it incorporates a repeating bass line that wears out too easily in six minutes of the song. Despite this, there are some cool moments, like when the drum picks up quickly at 2:13 or 3:40 where the guitar travels on the scales for a quick second, or 4:30 where it appears the drum gets faster for a quick second before coming to the slower hook. This shows a great example of a flaw in their music that could be countered, where they can change between great mind-bending rhythms but then immediately change to another potentially less interesting rhythm.
Overall, their bold and profound frontier into microtonality led to a creative playground based on how imaginative they can be with about 24 tones and imaginative math rock rhythms. I hope they create many more weird guitar jams to feel through or headbang to in the future because there should be more wacky gimmick bands who bring a worthwhile journey into fun uncommon rhythms. In the Pitchfork album review, Christopher Weingarten equates the band as working with the “unsexiest music in history” and making it the coolest thing. From the fascinating examples he brings up of off-kilter guitar playing and other unconventional rock bands, I kindly disagree with his statement. Angine De Poitrine has a clear passion for Microtonality, combining it with progressive rhythms and math rock techniques that is pronounced fully throughout their entire music spree. Antoine De Poitrine has shown off their creativity, and they use those genres to their strength as much as their predecessors who have experimented with microtonality across time and history.
Listen to the album below:
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