Oddball Quebec duo Angine de Poitrine are blowing up online – their recent KEXP performance has racked up over 3.5 million views. And at the heart of their music is a crudely put-together microtonal guitar that has unlocked otherworldly possibilities for guitarist Khn de Poitrine.
Drawing parallels with Jack White’s half-guitar, half-bass ‘Ugly Stick,’ the guitar’s guitar/bass double-neck design is defined by its completely bonkers fret spacing. We’ve seen some intruiging double-necks in our time – Bumblefoot’s fretless monster comes to mind – but this is a different beast.
Article continues below“I built the first microtonal guitar we used myself,” he says. “I added more frets on a guitar with a saw. The moment we started playing it, we just laughed. But since I’m not a guitarist, I wasn’t using the instrument’s full potential.
“I brought it to Khn, and I told him, ‘You have to try this, it makes absolutely no sense,’” he adds. “The moment we started playing with it, we just laughed because of the friction created and the proximity of the notes.”
For a band that, Klek tells Flood Magazine, is founded upon a mutual desire for “getting laughs out of grotesque improvisations,” this one-of-one instrument is more than their secret weapon.
The band's sound is a molotov cocktail of math rock, “Zappa-like phrasing,” prog, and jazz. It's the latter here, informed by Klek's love of Japanese and Indian music, that they lean into the most with the guitar's microtonal expanse.
They’ve become obsessed with the “friction between notes”, but harmonically, compare their work to John Scofield’s Überjam or Miles Davis's So What.
The pair also cite Turkish rock and the Gamelan music that King Crimson explored on Discipline as influences. But as time goes on, they’re making this oddball instrument their own.
“We're going deeper into a personal language that's very much rooted in a rock groove aesthetic,” Khn explains. “We haven't been playing with this for that long. In my 20 years of playing guitar, I've maybe spent four or five exploring microtonality. It's a door we've just opened, really.
“The goal,” he says, “is to use these notes like any others. Not as decoration but as the language itself.”
Australian psych-rock mavericks King Gizzard are another outfit known for exploring microtonal tunings. There’s a great deal of exploration of the notes between notes yet to be done in the wild world of the electric guitar.
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