Angine de Poitrine

A friend of mine, who happens to be a Berlin-based funk musician, recently told me about this new hot band called Angine de Poitrine. For non-French speakers, that literally means angina pectoris, a fairly serious heart condition. Obvious name for a band.

But there’s nothing obvious about Angine de Poitrine anyway.

Starting with their appearance, straight out of an absurdist off-off-Broadway play, or a very inspired Tim Burton movie. Indeed, this pair of musicians wear outlandish headgear, matching costumes, all the way to the drummer’s set and the guitarist’s painted feet. Call that commitment to the craft. Also, they don’t talk: their tracks are effectively instrumental save for a few undecipherable backing vocals, and their interviews have them utter sounds that apparently form a language only they understand — and whoever then translates them into perfectly articulate subtitles. But, more importantly, the type of music they produce is somewhat of a departure for the Sabrina Carpenter-loving crowds out there.

Although the band are often described as math-rock practitioners, their style is actually based on what is technically called microtonal music. Something fairly unusual in Western music but quite common in other traditions: instead of sticking to the tones and semitones we have based most of our music on, Angine de Poitrine play quarter-tones thanks to custom-made guitars with extra frets. Which makes their melodies sound vastly different from your typical power-chord based pop song. Chord progressions, even simply note progressions, become a very different experience with this microtonal approach, which gives the band all of its musical edge.

Interestingly though, as Rick Beato pointed out, what they ultimately play is not necessarily impossibly complex. Once you integrate the fact that the band uses 24 pitches rather than 12 in the chromatic scale, what they then do with it is fairly straightforward: going up and down the scale, often looping their melodies. There is a very good reason for that: as there are only two musicians on stage and one of them is the drummer, the guitar player has to handle all of the melodic work. He therefore uses loop pedals, which means he has to work with recurring musical patterns. And that’s how the Angine de Poitrine sausage is made.

I suspect there is another reason the band is not going completely crazy with their artistry. As a marketer, I can’t help but admire the consistency with which they patiently crafted their project, from appearance to performance to writing to press… Whoever these musicians are (we don’t know their real names), they obviously brainstormed the heck out of this venture, leaving very little to chance. They knew microtonal music would be foreign enough to land them in the WTF category, but they didn’t want to alienate listeners by then making their work impossible to understand (see: atonal music). So they stuck to 24 pitches (you could theoretically conceive of more) and patterns that people would recognize…

Crazy is considered crazy good only if it is somewhat palatable.