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Chest Pain. Highly Recommended.

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Angine de Poitrine FANART
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The world produces music like hamburgers, uniform, predictable, optimised to please as many people as possible. Then comes a Canadian duo, playing between the notes in a time signature you can’t count, and one concert recording accumulates over ten million views.

People are not stupid. They just rarely get the chance to prove it.

I have around 700 vinyl records. A large part of them is what I’d call weirdness, prog rock, Zappa, free jazz, Mongolian throat singing, experimental contemporary classical etc. Music that doesn’t explain itself.

Perhaps that’s why this newcomer speaks to me.

Angine de Poitrine is built on microtonality. It means a tuning system where the notes live between what the Western ear considers standard, not wrong, but deliberately elsewhere.

Khn builds the songs in real time using a loop pedal, layering lines played on a double-necked instrument, guitar on one neck and bass on the other, until the structure is running. After that, you can only add or subtract.

Klek holds all of this together with drums that move in time signatures you can’t fit into a count, 17/4, 10/4, 28/4, but which the body understands before the brain has time to wonder why.

Between songs the duo communicates in a language they invented and nobody else speaks. Except that the audience has learned three words. They are the band’s name, which means chest pain, a pressing feeling in the chest, and the audience repeats them back.

Angine de Poitrine was born from a practical problem. The duo had been booked at the same local venue in Saguenay (Quebec) twice in the same week. The solution was straightforward. They masked up, played under a different name, and waited to see if anyone would come. It started as purely hiding their faces. It became a permanent condition.

Klek says that inside his mask during a show he can see only one tom and his crash cymbal. The temperature rises to fifty degrees Celsius by the end, and he says he sometimes comes close to passing out. Khn says he likes the ritual. What that means in practice, they keep to themselves.

It’s easy to say the eccentric masks, which I really dig, are a marketing trick. But Khn has been clear about it. If the masks ever come off, that means a new project, a new name, a new identity. Angine de Poitrine and the mask are the same thing. In an era where being a musician often means building a social media persona more than making music, this is almost counter-cultural.

Before Angine de Poitrine‘s rise, the same duo operated under the name La Poexe, earlier also La Poêsse. With faces showing, under their real names, without masks. The music was related but rawer. Canada’s public copyright registry confirms that both projects share the same composers. Fan communities unearthed this quickly, and unmasked videos from before the viral moment are now available to watch.

That doesn’t make the mask any less real.

James Gutierrez, a music professor at Northeastern University, ran an experiment. He prompted Suno, one of the most popular AI music tools, to generate a track in the style of Angine de Poitrine. The result was, by his account, noticeably more conventional progressive rock. Not bad, but not this.

I create art with AI myself. I don’t consider it a dirty word. AI is a tool like any other, and in the right hands it produces things that wouldn’t exist otherwise. But Gutierrez’s experiment points at something real. AI draws from what already exists. It’s a brilliant assistant but a poor pioneer. Angine de Poitrine has been built from twenty years of shared history, physical presence, and a love of microtonality that started long before anyone asked them to produce anything. That can’t be prompted into existence.

Not yet.

Sources and listening

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