Angine de Poitrine Remixed: An Appreciation

My Book/eBook: Electronic and Experimental Music, sixth edition, Routledge 2020.

My Podcast: The Holmes Archive of Electronic Music

My blog for the Bob Moog Foundation.

Original music by Thom Holmes can be found in iTunes and on Bandcamp.

photo courtest thepugrock.blogspot.com

Playlist

Parts of various songs including Fabienk, Sarniezz, Tohogd, and Sherpa from the first two Angine de Poitrine albums.

Angine de Poitrine (which translates in English to “chest pain” as in a prelude to a heart attack) is a jazz-rock duo from Quebec that you have probably heard of even if you have tuned-0in to this podcast for the first time. I don’t need to say more but encourage you to watch any number of videos that are playing on YouTube. The purpose of this episode is to show some appreciation for the band by remixing many of our favorite parts of their recordings into a kind of bizarre reflection of what they do so well.

YouTube is now full of video reactions, first time listens, and critiques of Angine de Poitrine’s music, their stage presence, and how they do it. Every concert they perform is being streamed within hours by an adoring fan. The majority of these reactions think of Angine as some kind of alien entity making the strangest music they’ve ever heard. But listeners to this podcast have heard far stranger sounds, so let’s think a little about what makes their music so enjoyable. Because that is what it is. Unpretentious, pure joy in sound.

Eric Sinkins, a dear friend in Toronto, turned us on to the band. My partner Anne Benkovitz and I have been listening to them A LOT. We observed some things worth noting. You will first note that the music is microtonal (quarter tones) which is not in itself unfamiliar to listeners of electronic music, however, it is played on a specially-constructed, double-neck lead and bass guitar. These guitar necks are built with frets between the standard frets, proving many more note possibilities for the guitarist that can be easily repeated. Note that a fretless bass can play microtones, but finding them is a trick. The drummer is super busy as the two of them often play in two or three differing rhythms at once. This is made possible by the guitarist”s use of a pedal board featuring a Boss looper. Three loops are usually devoted to the six-string guitar and three to the bass. Each has a separate output for amplification and the guitarist can control the separate volumes with his feet. Among the other pedal effects are a ring modulator which, when combined with some kind of audio processor creates the alien-sounding vocals. Both musicians appear to be wired for vocal sounds inside their masks. The drummer seems to be listening to a click track. We have speculated that they can also talk to each other from within their masks to make the signaling of musical changes easier.

Because their music is microtonal, the first impression of most listeners is that it’s out of tune. But give it a chance and you begin to realize that they have setup conditions that are then perfectly fulfilled by every note and every drumbeat. By introducing purely microtonal passages, they shape the listener’s expectations for what will follow. The polyrhythms add a degree of complexity that train your ears to hear the unexpected. And they deliver marvelously.

The music can be fast-paced, complex in a way that is, at first, difficult to grasp rhythmically. But it is full of expression, accents, and expressive moments. Saying that, I have asked myself, if the standard piano scale of 12 notes has moods associated with the choice of keys (for example, minor keys seem sad or introspective, major keys seem optimistic and joyful), what does this microtonal music present? I think this is one of the unexpected aspects of listening to Angine. You are not faced with familiar moods and keys, but with a kind of more detached objectivity that allows you to hear the music as if you haven’t heard music before. It reminds us of the joy of hearing an unfamiliar tune that speaks to us.   

This remix combines several techniques used by electronic dance musicians to take in Angine’s music and reapply various loops and effects to create a similar but even more exaggerated audio experience. In essence, I used similar looping techniques to reconstruct their music using their patterns. Based on their polytonal rhythms, I sometimes found that the virtual turntables sped-up uncontrollably while syncing tracks.