On New Music

Microtonality is having a moment. I am late to this trend, but two days ago I discovered the Québécois rock band duo Angine de Poitrine who is now all over the internet. Back in February, the Seattle radio station KEXP posted a YouTube video of a set the band did at a music festival in Rennes, France in December. This video rapidly went viral, and as of this writing has 14.8 million views on YouTube. Clearly the band has tapped into something in the public’s consciousness, but what?

The first thing one notices on the video are the Dadaesque costumes — masked figures in black and white polkadots with especially long noses. The conceit is that they are alien timetravellers, brothers named Khn and Klek de Poitrine. Klek is the drummer, and Khn plays a double-necked combination bass and guitar. Look closely at the bass-guitar combo and one will notice rather a lot of frets on the two necks.

The costumes may be what draw people to look at the band, but the music is what is compelling and new. The reason for the large number of frets is that it is a microtonal instrument, and the frets are spaced in quarter tones. The band plays microtonal math rock, the latter meaning there are a lot of complex time signatures and polyrhythms. And the two musicians are really good: they have been playing together since they were teenagers. Khn uses a live looper to layer different bass and guitar lines together in sequence, which seems like quite a feat of hand-foot-toe coordination. Despite the complexity of the music, it remains accessible with a strong groove.

Commentary on the band is its own subgenre on YouTube. Some of this commentary goes into music theory: there are videos looking at the microtonality, and other videos analyzing the polyrhythms. There is other discussion about why this band has gone viral. One thread that comes up a lot is that the band has put things together in a way that could not have been done by AI. Despite being alien timetravelers, what they have done is a profound act of human creativity.