If you love music and you’ve been on any social media lately, you’ve likely run into a clip of Angine de Poitrine. The experimental rock duo from Quebec is hard to miss in their black-and-white polka dot costumes, and their outlandish music has captured the world’s imagination. Their Live on KEXP performance has racked up over 4.5 million views in just a month.
As one YouTube commenter points out, “It’s crazy how they can sound exactly like they look.”
Though it seems to be in jest, that is an extremely apt assessment. Their surreal outfits are jarring but follow a meticulous structure. Similarly, Angine de Poitrine’s music may seem chaotic, but upon closer inspection, we find that every pitch and pulse is deliberate. We can explore that in the song “Sarniezz,” which they used to open their KEXP performance.
Watch the clip of their performance and be mesmerized:
The band immediately sets itself apart from typical bands in its instrumentation. Angine features a drummer, Klek de Poitrine, and a guitarist, Khn de Poitrine, who plays a double-neck instrument consisting of a guitar and a bass. Khn builds up the songs using an enormous pedalboard. Specifically, they use a looping pedal that records and repeats short musical phrases. After building the bass line, Khn layers in guitar riffs to create a wall of sound, then clears the loops to build on new ideas. This alone forces them to get creative in their compositional approach.
The real key to their sound, though, is through microtonality. Look closely at the Khn’s fretboards and you’ll notice they have twice as many frets as a standard guitar or bass. This allows them to play pitches between the twelve standard notes found in Western music. We call these “half sharp” or “half flat,” and we can mark them in notation. As Classic FM explains, a “lower than a flattened note often have a flat sign, but flipped backwards, or what looks like a double flat sign, while microtones higher than a sharpened note often have a sharp sign that’s got an extra side (‘double sharp’), or a little cross sign.”
Angine de Poitrine begins “Sarniezz” by laying down a microtonal bass line, then doubling it on the guitar and adding a second guitar part that acts as harmony. Playing three microtonal lines together may seem too dissonant, but their ingenious layering gives the music just enough edge without totally putting off listeners. Pianist and music theory educator David Bennett explains that most of the harmonic intervals we’re hearing are intervals we’re used to hearing, like minor or major thirds.
“Their root note is a quarter tone different from the previous note, but at any given moment in the music, we’re not really hearing a microtonal harmony,” he explains. “We’re hearing a regular harmony potentially rooted on a microtonal note.”
The band instead utilizes microtonality in their riffs by using stepwise motion and smaller intervals. As such, our ears can process each note as a separate pitch rather than just an out-of-tune interval.
Watch Bennett’s video for more perspective:
Angine de Poitrine’s music challenges the Western notion of melody, harmony, and intonation. By embracing microtonality and carefully layering loops, they turn dissonance into design. Their world is one where precision and the absurd can coexist, and that tension is what makes them so electrifying. Whether you’re a music theory fan or a casual listener, Angine de Poitrine reminds us that experimentation has the power to thrill.
You can follow along with this transcription video for “Sarniezz” by Stephen Weigel, and for anyone without a microtonal bass, MuseScore user Finn Smith has created a great tablature chart below.
