Canadian math rock sensations Angine de Poitrine have been globetrotting amidst their recent viral success, and their one-of-a-kind double-neck guitar has been causing chaos at customs.
The duo, whose KEXP performance has clocked up 13m views in three months, use loop pedals and microtonality to make their hypnotic, off-kilter music. Their double-neck guitar – with one neck for bass and the other for a six-string electric guitar – and its many frets sit at the center of their success. But getting it through the airport has been another matter.
“The guitar gets funny questions because I carry it in a sleeping bag and it looks like a dead body,” says Khn de Poitrine, the beast’s tamer, in a rare new interview with the Guardian. (In case you’re wondering, the duo’s masks don’t cause the same problems, since they’re stashed in their suitcases.)
So far, the custom double-neck, which is equipped with micro-tonal frets, has made it through security each time. The band’s experiments with 'in-between' notes originated when drummer Klek sawed extra frets onto an existing guitar, with a less crude model coming later.
But Klek pins some of their success on the fact that microtonal “sounds new for people.” King Gizzard are by no means a small band, but it really feels like the Canadians have put microtonal music well and truly on the map.
“There’s a feeling of anxiousness or something that comes with the repetitions, the frictions with the microtones,” Klek says in the Guardian interview. “We’re always playing with that feeling, and tension and release.”
Khn, meanwhile, says their limited numbers and reliance on loop pedals to maximize their sound live means they have a “tendency to make songs that go from A to Z without coming back to A or B.
“People have fallen in love with the rawness and simplicity,” he adds.
They’ve previously admitted their first microtonal explorations started out as a joke, but the way the band has blown up in recent months is no laughing matter. And in an age when AI music is infiltrating streaming services, Angine de Poitrine have given the tech a whole new world to decode. It might just make it implode.
