A friend pointed me to this Angine de Poitrine performance, and the damn thing punched me in the face like a blunt fist. It knocked me down. Stunned me. It took me a few days to figure out what happened.
Image: Adapted from Angine de Poitrine live on KEXP. (“ahn-ZHEEN duh pwah-TREEN”)
To paraphrase E.B. White, art can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process. I’m not going to let that stop me from dissecting this band.
The first thing that hits you about the video is that you’re watching theater. Two musicians in oversized headgear playing instruments. One plays drums; the other plays a double-neck bass/guitar and crazy pedalboard. Everything you see is black and white polka dots. Any skin left uncovered is painted with dots. Even without any music, the image is optimized for the viral Instagram scroll. It forces the question: what the hell is this? Is this an empty gimmick or is there something more?
Because you can’t see the faces of the musicians who call themselves Khn and Klek, you aren’t distracted by their faces. You are forced to look at the costumes, the gear, the performing. The masks are absurd. And the noses… Oh, those hilarious noses! One juts straight out like a foot-long wooden phallus on a demented plague doctor, while the other sways back and forth like the ding-dong of a stoned Burning Man dancer. You can tell, these guys don’t take themselves too seriously.
Then you start to notice deliberate details: the recurring gold triangles, the tiny gold pyramid perched on the hi-hat stand, the six-sided dice used as switches on the guitar, dollar signs stenciled over the guitarist’s eyeholes. None of it is accidental. Khn and Klek appear fully formed, completely committed, and so far out-there that it’s clear they are just going for what they like, even if nobody else does.
Then you realize the physical reality: inside those papier-mâché helmets, the musicians are essentially blind. Before they kick off a tune, they turn toward each other and press their hands together into a triangle. It is their silent code for OK, I’m ready when you are.
When they start playing, that visual limitation turns what could be a cheap party trick into an impressive feat of performance. Playing a double-neck instrument with no peripheral vision forces the player to rely mostly on tactile muscle memory and auditory feedback. The mask isn’t just a costume; it’s a constraint that forces serious focus.
We’ve all seen bands dress up to manufacture a spectacle. Think of KISS. As a kid, I loved KISS; my friends and I put on their vinyl and air-guitared in our basements. Usually, when a band wears masks, the gimmick is compensating for something simple underneath. With KISS, the makeup was just Kabuki theater disguising conventional 1970s hard rock.
But AdP operates on an entirely different level. Weirder, leaner, more low-budget. The costumes aren’t compensating for a lack of ideas, they’re amplifying the otherworldliness of the strange sounds.
And the music… What is it? Is it even music? At first, I tried to understand what I was hearing by understanding what time signature they were playing. I started counting, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven…, trying to find the “one” in each phrase. But then the music was lost to me. I stopped experiencing it, like those parents watching their kid’s live ballet recital on their little phone screen.
When the music starts, it takes a while to hear the musicality. It just sounds like a bunch of sounds. What am I listening to? Where’s the pattern? But then as the band builds together and adds new layers, they start to draw you in. You get the sense that something is going on, and that something is intentional and tightly crafted, but alien.
What makes it alien? Start with the guitar and bass. They are not from planet earth. A guitar neck built for planet earth has frets that start wide apart at the far end and get gradually closer together as you travel towards the body. But not these necks. These necks have wide fret spacing near the tuners, narrow spacing in the middle, and then wide again up near the body. So, the notes don’t align with traditional western music. They’re not based on a conventional 12-note octave. The music uses the notes between the conventional notes. You couldn’t play AdP on a piano, because a piano can’t give you the notes between the keys. So, the tones are alien.
The rhythms are alien too. They use time signatures that keep you guessing about what you’re hearing. At first the rhythms are disorienting with a bunch of extra beats. But soon you begin to hear some structure that says, This is intentional – just keep listening! And then you’re rewarded when the band locks into a groove and gets your head bobbing.
This reveals that the band has an acute awareness of what is musically conventional. Which means that they know the rules of four-on-the-floor rock & roll, but they just choose to break the rules. Sure, sometimes they are alien math rock, but then they evolve to become a 100-ton freight train that could run you over.
Some people love deconstructing complex music. Dissecting the frog. Talking about microtonal angularity and metric modulation, blah blah blah. But none of that speaks to the heart of the music. The heart of the music is two guys doing something they are obsessively devoted to doing. You can tell they are obsessively devoted to it because of the energy they bring to the performance and because they are experts in a language that they clearly created themselves. Like Esperanto with amps. To become that tight, they must have devoted hundreds and hundreds of hours inventing this alien musical language and developing their fluency. You don’t get to that level by not being obsessively devoted to it.
You can see it by the energy they bring. The drummer lifts off his chair to smash a cymbal. The guitarist’s excited two-stepping when he’s not tapping pedals. They are into it and so they draw you into it. The best way to draw someone into your performance is for you to be really into your performance. They are not playing for the audience. They are playing for each other, and the audience gets to watch.
I can imagine Khn and Klek, bleary-eyed, emerging from an all-nighter in a smoky basement in Saguenay, Quebec (definitely a basement, not a rented jam space – have you ever been to Saguenay, Quebec…?!). They smirk at each other as if to say, that stuff we did all night was epic!! “Capoté!!”
But, wait a minute. All of this verbiage is just dancing around the big question, Is the music any good?
I confess, a friend had sent me their music via Spotify a few months ago, and I listened for about 30 seconds before moving on. It didn’t hook me. It wasn’t until I saw the video that I got hooked.
Sure, the music is technically amazing. If you play music, you know how tough it can be to perform live, and especially when it’s just two musicians and you are jumping around from instrument to instrument in complex time signatures and staying synced wearing blinding headgear. That is incredibly difficult. So, the performance is impressive.
But is the music good, like, I would choose to listen to it while driving? No, I would not say this would be my road-trip music. But that doesn’t make it any less enjoyable. It is amazing as a video performance. Video is the perfect way to consume this experience, because it’s theater. In other words, the full impact is delivered when you experience the whole music/art/theater package.
Would these guys work in a giant arena? Could they do what KISS did? Maybe. But with an arena rock show, the audience would not be able to see many of the things that make this performance really enjoyable, such as the barefoot guitarist fiddling with the pedal knobs with his toes. Also, with an arena-rock show, it’s better to have more than just two dudes standing in one spot playing their instruments. You want more movement, more theatrics, more audience engagement. Because AdP’s music is so complex, the guitar player is pretty much married to his pedalboard. He can’t run around the stage like Jack White or Taylor Swift.
So, no, I don’t think the best venue for AdP is a stadium. I think the best venue size is intimate, like a small club or a living room. Fantastic party band! In fact, the perfect venue would be a basement in Saguenay, Quebec!
And this wouldn’t work at all if the two musicians weren’t completely locked into one another. When you watch them, you can’t help but realize you are watching two entities from another planet who developed their own brand of music based on the different gravitational pull of their strange world. They are alien, but in sync with one another, and earthlings can come along for the ride if they want.
It’s more than music. It’s art that just happens to use music to keep our attention and move the plot forward. What’s the plot? I have no idea. But it’s not random. When you listen, you understand that there’s a structure that starts simple, builds, adds variations, and culminates in a big, loud, noisy cymbal-crashing climax.
This music only exists in their partnership, nowhere else on the planet, so as long as it’s internally consistent with their strange sensibilities, it’s perfect as it is.
If KISS proved that theater could scale ordinary music into stadiums, Angine de Poitrine proves that constraints can elevate difficult, unapproachable music into heartfelt theater.
If KISS washed off their makeup, they could still play “Rock and Roll All Nite” on acoustic guitars in a radio studio, and it would sound exactly the same. The makeup is purely decorative. Their gimmick is a costume party on top of the music.
But with AdP, the music literally cannot happen without the setup. With AdP, if you strip away any of the elements – the costumes, the double-neck switch, the barefoot tap-dance on the pedalboard — the alien engine doesn’t work.
Why does this work? It works because it hits on different levels simultaneously: absurd visual art, high-level musical performance, and raw garage-rock energy. This is a unified alien spaceship that needs all the parts to run properly.
In a world of AI and digitally enhanced music, Khn and Klek stand out. Auto-Tune software is ubiquitous in the music we hear. The result, when combined with other recording-studio enhancements, is sterile and lacking heart. It’s the sonic equivalent of a patient’s face that’s had too much plastic surgery. It just feels… unnatural.
By contrast, AdP feels fresh and organic. Let the irony sink in for a moment… It’s ironic because they built their music on tones and beats that are out of step with most listeners. When you hear it, it sounds less like Top-40 and more like indigenous music from Africa or Asia or somewhere where they don’t use tuning forks. Ironically, these two aliens in carnival costumes are making the most human music I have heard in a long time.
