Unless you’ve been living under a rock without WiFi for the past month or so, you’ll know the Canadian microtonal math rock duo, Angine de Poitrine, has blown up beyond belief. But it was never meant to be like this.
They’ve just released their second album, which was propelled into the limelight after a KEXP performance that went viral at lightning pace – it has 9.6 million views at the time of writing – and their double-necked microtonal guitar/bass hybrid has taken the gear world by storm. Even Dave Grohl’s a fan.
Yet, speaking to Cult Mtl, they’ve confessed that their tumble down the bonkers rabbit hole of microtonal music was a joke at first. Until they realized they’d struck gold.
“This project is a culmination of a lot of years of inside jokes,” guitarist Khn explains. “The names were our alter egos in a 10-minute free jazz project, where I was just fooling around on saxophone and (Klek) was on drums.
“At first, the idea for the costumes was to play more shows and play a bit of an Andy Kaufman-esque joke on the crowd and say, ‘Hey, can we start a band without anybody knowing who we are?” Klek returns.
The guitar and Khn's masterful use of a loop pedal to give them a real, larger-than-life sound are their not-so-secret secret weapons. But that too was born out of the desire for a quick chuckle. The thing is, that never subsided.
“We thought it would look fucking sick, and for 15 seconds, we were like, ‘Oh, that’s a funny joke.’” Klek says of the guitar. “But it became clear that it was a good idea.”
In the first experiment, Klek sawed more frets onto an existing guitar. It was crude. Then, they started exploring more professional options. One quote of $12,000 per fretboard had them bawking, though. So they turned to a “professional friend” for help.
“The whole idea of the band was to assume a bit of a satirical approach to rock music in general,” Khn details. “We wanted an exaggeration, so the double-neck guitar was the perfect choice to kind of make fun of guitar heroes.
“[It's a bit of] a caricature, because you’ve got to be able to laugh at yourself and say, ‘What we do is ridiculous.’”
Australian experimentalists King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard have toyed with microtonal tunings in the past, but this duo has taken matters to a whole new level.
There are serious levels of musicianship at hand, but the band also doesn't take itself too seriously. No wonder they've charmed half the globe!
