The guy in the polka-dot suit is playing something that looks like a guitar but isn’t. Two necks, strange frets, and when he hits a chord it lands just slightly outside where your brain expects it to land. I watched the KEXP video twice before I could place what I was feeling. I’d felt that before, in a different context, a long time ago.
I’ve been playing guitar since 1988. Four of those years were before Puppen started — just me and the instrument, figuring things out. Ten years after that were in Puppen, a hardcore band in Bandung that was fast, loud, and political, which was the correct thing to be in Indonesia in the 1990s. I never stopped after that. You spend that long with one instrument and you develop a very specific sense of what it’s supposed to sound like. Which means you also know when someone is doing something to it on purpose.
Entombed were Swedish. Death metal, early nineties, Stockholm. Their whole sound was built on a guitar tone that was ugly by design — a particular combination of pedal and tuning that people started calling the buzzsaw. It defined an entire scene and it influenced a generation of bands who understood that a bad sound, pushed far enough, stops being bad.
Angine de Poitrine are a duo from Saguenay, Quebec. They went viral in February when KEXP posted their Trans Musicales set. The guitarist built a custom instrument specifically to play microtones — the intervals that fall between the standard notes of Western music. You can’t play a normal chord on it. It’s the whole idea. Not a limitation.
They cite Indonesian gamelan as one of their influences, alongside Turkish, Arabic, and Indian music. In the mid-nineties I had a conversation with Prof. Jeremy Wallach, an American ethnomusicologist who spent years studying Indonesia’s underground music scene and knew Puppen’s work well. I told him that if Puppen continued, I wanted us to move toward traditional Indonesian music fused with metal. We disbanded in 2002 before that happened. Two guys from Quebec got there instead. I find this funny.
Playing hardcore and listening to metal trains you to hear texture as an argument. Entombed’s buzzsaw was a position. A statement, not decoration. Angine de Poitrine’s microtonality is the same kind of stubbornness, just pointed somewhere else. The notes are wrong on purpose. You follow the logic or you don’t, and if you spent years in a field where the music was trying to say something specific, you probably follow it.
A metal background won’t prepare you for everything. But it does prepare you for music that insists on itself, and Angine de Poitrine insist on themselves pretty hard. Two people, a rebuilt instrument, masks, and enough odd rhythms to make your head tilt. Turns out the Bandung years were decent training for that.