The universe in black and white

Guest writer Mark Lepage on cult-rock phenomenon Angine de Poitrine. Commence the microtonal looping

Khn (l) and Klek (r) de Poitrine. I can’t believe I know which is which.

This one will take some setting up.

Mark Lepage was the rock critic for The Gazette in Montreal from 1988 to 2001. Which means he got there a year before I did, and I have always trusted him implicitly.

Last month on Facebook I asked friends for the names of up-and-coming musicians I should know about. Mark wanted to talk about Angine de Poitrine. They’re a costumed, anonymous instrumental duo from Saguenay by way of some shattered interdimensional universe. Their name is French for “angina pectoris,” which is the chest pain that can precede a heart attack. When Mark wrote to me I had just begun to focus on them, because everyone in Quebec was talking about their appearance a few days earlier on Tout le monde en parle.

Every indoor venue on their world tour through November is sold out, although they’ll play outdoors for free at the Festival International de Jazz de Montréal and can be seen with general-admission tickets to the outdoor Ottawa Bluesfest. Foo Fighters guitarist Dave Grohl said they “blew my f*&$ing mind” and music Youtuber Rick Beato begged his followers to stop writing him about Angine, in a video which itself drew 2.3 million viewers.

Ground Zero for Angine-mania is this video from their appearance at a festival in France, which was posted on the Youtube channel of a Seattle radio station only two months ago. It’s closing on nine million views.

And now, here with more is Mark Lepage. — pw

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Because it is not there.

Pace Edmund Hillary, that’s the correct math for musical creativity and exploration. Because while climbing an Everest looming before you may be the challenge as a mountaineer, launching a newfangled musical project is after the opposite goal. It’s filling an absence. An ask that isn’t even asked yet. What an audience cannot yet see or hear. Over to the suddenly famous nobodies* in Angine de Poitrine.

By now, you may have heard of this polkadot-head duo. Some of you certainly have: 8.5 million Youtube views and counting of their 28-minute performance on KEXP in France. We cannot guarantee that 10 million people (by the time you’ve read this) will have watched all 28 minutes of that singular set, but each one of them clicked on a link that was significantly longer than the average 3:17 attention span. Three weeks ago, the duo announced their first New York show at a groovy club called Le Poisson Rouge in the West Village, capacity about 900. Great place to see a band. A week later, word-of-net added a second show. Which sold out in 4 minutes.

Those might be normal numbers for some hot-hot new indie singer-songwriter, or whatever follows K-Pop. Not so much for a duo with no names or faces – hence the * above. Last October, there was a rooftop Pop Montréal show. This summer, there will be a Festival International de Jazz de Montréal outdoor gig on the main stage that will draw dozens of thousands and generate massive media coverage of uniquely Kébek weirdness. These guys were playing in a Chicoutimi closet a year ago. So how did we get here? And what does it mean?

Well, ultimately, why shouldn’t there be a mirror-inverse polka dot-suited jazz-rock duo in papier-mâché piñata heads with fake interplanetary names? If ever there were a world-time that needed its head fucked with… And Saguenay duo Angine de Poitrine are serious as a heart attack.

Chicoutimi is a 5-hour drive northeast of Montreal, meaning it only gets colder, and isolated. Makes perfect sense as the place where Angine de Poitrine could hatch. Where a duo named Klek and Khn could woodshed on drums and a double-neck microtonal bass/guitar, respectively - as in, frets within frets, 36 on the guitar, 32 on the bass - and cook up a “mantra-rock dada-pythago-cubiste” sound, with Khn triggering a genuinely impressive and disciplined set of loops on the effects rack.

From there it was a 9-hour flight from Montreal to Rennes, France for a 27:53 performance in December during the Trans Musicales 2025 festival, launched into virality by KEXP global media on Youtube, which should be seen to be believed and has been by zillions and counting. Ladies and gentlemen, meet The Angies (you’re welcome).

Two conceptualists seemingly embalmed in papier-mâché polygon-cartoon outfits. To the right you’ve got Klek on drums in the white pyjamas and black papier-maché head-tube with the flaccid nosepiece, in black arm (and what appears to be face) paint. To his left, Khn in black bodysuit and white inverted triangle headpiece, also full polkadot regalia, playing the bespoke doubleneck guitar/bass, volume or tone knob shaped like a die, with an Area-51 rack of pedals on which he aggressively (and transparently) triggers bass and guitar loops to play over-with-against, all done with bare feet. Also polka dotted. The feet, I mean.

After a little triangle hand-sign ritual between the duo and out to the audience sets the mood, opener Sarniezz leaps from its plodding intro to a winding relentlessness and unfolds into a controlled double-time chaos. The speed-desert Mata Zyklekk sends an intimidatingly tight guitar lick over propulsive drums, while the devastating Fabienk opens with staggered robofunk before releasing into two of the best heavy riffs in a decade+, played at once on bass and guitar. Sherpa revels in an Eastern or Saturn motif driven by hammer-ons and pull-offs. Four songs in less than 28 minutes, meaning they shred the 4-minute straitjacket in every track, followed by the triangle hand-sign and robot-ribbit voice.

And man, it must be hot in those suits. Malade, ’stie. That is dedication.

But here’s the thing. It is intricate. It is fast. These are identifiably prog-jazz stagger-rhythms and atonal guitar figures and scales, but the momentum is identifiably rock’n’roll, an obsessive, self-cycling Groove above all, with Khn worrying every tautly-wound, obsessive riff phrase on his double-neck. And yes, you can dance to it. As the drummer, his arms painted black and working beats from complex polyrhythms to driving 4/4, glares at you through the mouth slit of his headtube.

Not even Lady Gaga can channel that arcane drama, or this kind of geometric-math art design. Gen Z fell all over themselves, with the BrooklynVegan site hilariously referring to them as “Angine Poutine” and feverish online comments and posts running inspiringly wild:

I am intensely fascinated by every aspect of whatever the fuck this is

Never thought I’d be into microtonal math rock, but here I am

You can’t not dance. And I can’t even dance

Finally, the perfect romantic mood music for my next date

And best of all:

This is our reward for a quarter century of Coldplay

Well… yeah. But certainly, this is not all sui generis. There are precedents, or at least influences, in whole(s) or in parts. We could look at a laundry list of prog, prog-rock, prog-jazz, math-rock and mix-match all those subcategories of bands, but why subject you, dear reader, to that?

Louisiana’s venerable art collective The Residents will come up, for the anonymity, oddball headgear and avant-prog poise, but that’s as far as it goes. For all the dark cabaret obsessiveness of Duck Stab! / Buster & Glen, Not Available or the Top-40 mauling of Third Reich’n’Roll, even a cursory listen will settle that this band was a glancing influence at best. I mean, if it’s about anonymity, why not Ghost? (By the way, worth the gag to look up how the Residents got the band name). Throw an iteration of King Crimson into the mix.

No, let’s focus on the band that’s most often cited as a contemporaneous feeder: King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard. Aside from being a band name I could swear I invented one night at the Montreal Gazette bar, Australia’s band has the headfuck vibe, polyrhythmic elbows-out sonic assault that makes is likely pointless for me to try to define the genre(s) or concept that makes up this sound. So I’m going to do so anyway.

Their most math-rock album Polygondwanaland for all the time signatures (5/16, 7/16, 9/16, 5/4 etc) bears more resemblance to Johnny Clegg dancing among the goblins than anything impossibly arcane or alien. Skip over to 12 Bar Bruise (for the title alone…) and tracks Muckraker and Nein and you’re into indie Beach Boys/Pavement territory. Aggressively indie-osyncratic, but identifiably poppy. I mean, there are hooks in those time-signature shifts.

They once allegedly recorded a song with 4 iPhones in a room. Zany! And yes, they play microtonal guitar and bass… along with synth, piano, saxophone, Mellotron, harmonica, violin, cello, sitar, a Rush-ton of percussion and something called a zurna which I pointedly did not look up. There must be mystery in life. They also have something of a sextet line-up, and, yeah, vocals that carry melodies.

This is not remotely similar to the Angies. Gizzard (or maybe Liz-Wiz) have a dozen songs that could and do make it onto some form of what remains of radio, certainly in their native Oz. This band once released five albums in a calendar year by gar, so somebody is listening. And one might imagine Phish or Flaming Lips or even Tedeschi Trucks jumping onstage with this band for some Osheaga-style lollapaloozery - and in fact Slipknot drummer Jay Weinberg who hit the skins in Nashville, and even Jello Biafra (bless ‘im, get well soon, weirdo) already have.

Who is going to climb onto a currently small but soon to be quite teched-out stage with Khn and Klek? What would they do up there? Interpretive dance? If anything, the Angies are less arch and more focused than either of those bands.

Where is all this going? Well… it’s already gone there. The amalgam of oddballery, ambition, inspired symmetry and instrumental discipline are more encouraging than a dozen School-of-Rocks.

Fresh from releasing the Vol. II album, with 3 of the KEXP tracks, their website declaims “Angine de Poitrine is an anonymous artistic project. Any speculation regarding the identities of its members is unverified and not endorsed by the band”. Let’s enjoy the mystery while it lasts, because in hyper-saturated mediaworld we’ll be lucky if we last a week before some sleuth unearths high-school yearbook photos of these two as either super-nerds in braces, or Chicoutimi’s musical dissidents.

Above all, there is the triumphant return of regionalism, the Great Weirdness Incubator, the hidden haven fostering idiosyncrasy, experimentation and invention. Every single worthwhile strain of jazz or rock’n’roll or hip-hop emerged from a hidden or unknown scene where artists brewed up and absorbed the musical accents. I mean, CBGB was “regionalism” micro-located in one single dive. And out there, kids still want Weird.

This is from an interview with Alex Nino Gheciu of La Presse Canadienne.

«Parfois, je m’amuse en disant qu’on est un bon attrape-clics », souligne Khn. «Mais si, une fois qu’ils ont cliqué, les gens sont satisfaits musicalement parlant, tant mieux pour nous et tant mieux pour eux.»

(“Sometimes I joke that we’re good at getting clicks,” Khn states. “But if, once they’ve clicked, people are satisfied, musically speaking, that’s great for us and great for them.”)

Amen. Or whatever they say in outer space.