Copper has an exchange program with selected magazines, where we share articles, including this one, between publications. This one's from PMA Magazine: the Power of Music and Audio.
Mark Lepage discusses the push to bring the virtuosic polka-dotted duo to Saturday Night Live, and how the band may have saved guitar rock—or at least helped boost electric guitar sales.
Well. That escalated quickly.
While you nodded nearly napping, an initially obscure live 28-minute YouTube video from France was tabbing up over 12 million views (!) and literally counting. Quoth the Raven, millions more.
This might be easily explained if Angine de Poitrine were, say, the newest tatted hip-hopper or sublunary country bro or whatever follows K-pop. But no. Angine de Poitrine erupted from nowhere (well, Chicoutimi) into the musical body politic and the conversation over the past scant few months. Three instruments, bass, guitar and drums, played by two… characters. No lyrics. No voices. No politics. No faces. No kidding.
One month ago, the Angies (as I will call them) announced their first New York show set for September in a 900-capacity club called Le Poisson Rouge in the West Village. Place has a cavernous but appealing vibe. A week later, courtesy of that live video, a second show was added. Which sold out in four minutes.
They will witness the sensation that went from a Pop Montréal rooftop show last October to a blowout set for the Festival International de Jazz de Montréal’s massive outdoor main stage this summer, an audience multiplication of over 500x.
They will be conceptually outfitted in giant geometric papier-mâché puppet heads, with drummer Klek to the right in the white smock with black polkadots and black head-tube with dangling nosepiece (which must be a joy to strap into under stage lights), in black arm and face paint. To the left, Khn in the black boilersuit with white dots and white inverted 3-D quadrilateral helmet, playing a bespoke doubleneck microtonal bass/guitar – as in, frets within frets, 36 on the guitar, 32 on the bass, fusing a “mantra-rock dada-pythago-cubiste” sound, triggering an eye-and-ear-widening range of loops on a NASA-level effects rack while Klek powers the beat through a daring range of signatures. It should not work.
It does, and by the time you reach this point in the piece, we’ll be up to 14 million views. Serious as a coronary.Now before the math-jazz and dadarock nerds get too sweaty over the implications of this, there obviously are not 14-plus million fans of “mantra-rock dada-pythago-cubiste” because there could not possibly be. There is no math-rock revolution disembarking and charging up our musical shores, its seditionaries raising their bayoneted Fender Jazzmasters aloft. I mean, you can dream…but no.
What is happening is far more interesting. Up there in the hyperborean northeastern Saguenay, on Planet Chicoutimi, two veteran rock musicians (no younger than their 30s, possibly 40s) could revel in the regional anonymity and musical hermeticism afforded by locus and language (francophone) and brew up an alchemical sound matched by geometric art-design visuals, prompting a litany of posts under the video by bewitched fans including this gem: this is our reward for 25 years of Coldplay.
Indeed. Sure, there is a bit of Anginis Unicornis herein, not only in sound, identity, and presentation, but especially in profile. There’s the four-minute sellout thing (compelling this writer to start pulling in a few ticket favors between now and then); but there is also a nascent movement to get this band onto Saturday Night Live. And if I were a betting man (and I am), I wouldn’t want to lay mob-level heavy odds against the possibility of that happening. Or better yet, take the longshot odds and bet the farm. But there are certainly precedents, feeders, influences, with the most commonly cited being the Residents (weird eyeball-heads, anonymity), King Crimson (weird time signatures, virtuosity), and King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard (aggressively non-linear, 5/16, 7/16, 9/16, 5/4 etc). However, none of those bands is a duo. And none of them triggers loops with bare feet. As Khn most assuredly does, in complete transparency (i.e. no tricks or subterfuge).
The Angies are unlikely to dethrone Taylor or Justin or Sombr or Harry or Sabrina or Kehlani or whatever R&B/country flavor-of-week is populating the Billboard Hot 100. That is not how this works. Interplanetary left-field instrumental duos in papier-mâché puppetheads do not become popstars. Do they? Their anonymous identity, then, is an apt expression of where they come from (nowhere) and where they’re going – parts unknown, musically and popularly.
Is it a con? Certainly not, but it is a concept, and it makes perfect sense. The dadaist, formalist chiaroscuro presentation is perforce a perfect disguise in a world of K-pop Barbie dolls, against whom no mortal appearance – especially no mortal appearance that would have spent at least 30-plus years on this or any other planet — could hope to compete.
In the meantime, there is a thrillingly offstage implication here, and it involves axes.
Sometime around 2009, fittingly in the economic flotsam-wake of the financial crisis, observers of the musical instrument business issued a warning: guitar is dead. With popstresses, R&B and hip-hop dominant on the charts, and no baby boomers to drive Strat and Les Paul sales as they had from the 1950s to the 1990s, a sense of doom pervaded. People whispered of a used-guitar market “apocalypse,” with sales plummeting as kids focused on computer tech to make music without actually playing it. Sales plunged to a low of $821 million in the US.
It was sad and bad…until Gibson and Fender and Taylor and Martin and Yamaha got lucky with an unprecedented 60 percent explosion in sales from 2020 through 2023. You’re welcome, said the COVID-19 pandemic. Only so much time even kids can spend playing Halo Infinite or Battlefield V. While precise figures are tricky, my comparison data-shopping indicates that guitar sales increased by 15 percent from 2019 to 2020, with online retailers booming. Sales increased by 14 percent in 2023, reaching a total of $1.8 billion. And here comes this virtuoso duo with the microtonals…
The Angies have generated excitement for the concept, but also the virtuosity. The instrumentalism — and the instruments. Anecdotally, you may not see as many acne-landscaped wannabes playing “Smoke on the Water” or “Eruption” in the local guitar shop…
But further anecdotally, every Gen Z young person I know plays an instrument, including my singer-songwriter daughter and my nephew, who plays baritone sax and will never be jobless, called into every jazz or prog or perhaps even chamber combo that needs that radical specificity. The left field popularity of the Angies dovetails perfectly with that, a prospect that should be howled from every rooftop. Given it is my humble opinion that Gen Z is the most musically-tolerant of generations, there might be a band like this in every decent-sized city going forward. How can that be bad? If you’ve yet to hear this band’s “Fabienk,” strap in for a staggered robofunk opening that detonates into two devastating heavy riffs, played at once on bass and guitar, and fantasize about hearing that influence in a club near you.
Header image courtesy of Big Hassle Media/Constantin Monfilliette.
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