Angine de Poitrine

[Piet De Ridder]

I like this. I like everything about it.





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[scherzo]

That is one of the stranger things I've seen and heard in a while. In a good way. I'm utterly mesmerized by both the music and the performance.

Very cool - thanks for sharing!

(I should be going to sleep, but I need to hear Sherpa a fifth time first...)

[scherzo]

...no one else?

I've become weirdly obsessed with this band. They've been in constant rotation since I came across them in this thread, Sherpa probably has upwards of 300 plays on Spotify at this point, and I still watch the KEXP performance regularly - still cracks me up every time! I say weirdly because I don't normally go for this sort of thing. Microtonality in particular typically just makes my brain hurt in a bad way. But for whatever reason, I really like this. Really like it.

Anyhow - the new album was just released. I stayed up late staring at the countdown timer just so I could listen as soon as possible. It's really good. We've already heard much of the material at KEXP and on the singles, but the new stuff is also delightful.



As an aside: don't know if this is of interest to anyone, but according to rumors on the Interwebz (not officially confirmed as far as I know but it seems highly plausible) these guys previously played in a band called La Poexe. It's also a guitar-and-drums duo, stylistically different (more noise, less weirdness, no microtonal stuff) but also has a lot of similar sensibilities. Stylistic influences ranging from disco to sludge metal. But mostly metal and noise.



One of their more easy-listening tracks. I like it - check it out. It's good.

[Piet De Ridder]

Angine de Poitrine has made the national news here — on this very day, yes — because there are a few concerts planned in Belgium later this year. (The fact alone of a far-beyond-the-fringe-of-the-mainstream band making the national news over here, is already highly unusual and thus remarkable.) The news item (very well written as it happens, but there’s no point in linking to it as it’s in Dutch) also mentions La Poexe as a very likely dry run for Poitrine. I hadn’t heard any music of La Poexe though, so thanks for that, Scherzo!

Rick Beato had to ask his audience, a week or so ago, to stop sending him mails about Angine de Poitrine. Several hundreds a day he says he got, clogging up his in-box. He didn’t have all that much of interest to say about the band I thought, but one thing he said is true: you can’t plan this.

Depression, pessimism and professional fatigue stalk the music industry and most record companies have no clue anymore what to do, let alone the energy and the budgets to do it, and then, out of the Canadian blue, this happens: a strange two-man band playing weird, jarring, microtonal music — as unlikely to be broadly successful as anything you can imagine — and, moreover, completely devoid of anything that suggests a willingness to compromise for the sake of commerciality or formulaïc manageability. And this turns out to have unprecedented global success: 7 million views (and counting) of the Poitrine KEXP concert in barely two months time.

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[scherzo]

Indeed. I find it both amazing, amusing and reassuring to see something as uncompromisingly weird as this become such a phenomenon and viral sensation. Maybe there's hope for the world after all! And just on a personal level, it's kinda blown my mind a little - just when I thought I was getting old and settling into 'seen it all, heard it all' jadedness, this comes along to shake things up. Nice! (I've even been inspired to take my guitar back out of the closet again. I don't play very well and haven't practiced for over fifteen years now, but even playing music poorly on a physical instrument is a pretty fun change of pace after doing nothing but VI stuff for too long.)

I wouldn't mind getting a link for the news article. I don't speak Dutch, but maybe I can find a passable machine translation.

You gonna go catch the live show? I'm mostly a solitary animal and it takes a lot to get me to leave my cave voluntarily, but I would love to see these guys live if I ever get the chance. Alas, no concerts planned in my neck of the woods, at least not yet, and contintental Europe is a bit too far to travel.

Here's La Poexe playing live (music starts at around 3:45):



The playing style, instrument and pedal setup, even the body language and barefootedness... it's all verrry similar. Plus the fact that most clips seem to have been scrubbed from YouTube at exactly the same time as Angine de Poitrine exploded, almost as if someone is trying to hide something as such I'm a little hesitant to call attention to it, but on the other hand, the speculation is already out there, and I think La Poexe is also a pretty interesting band whose music deserves to be heard.

[Piet De Ridder]

Here's the link to the article, Scherzo:
https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/2026/03/28 ... -moet-hor/

I hope the translation engine can capture something of the tone of the Dutch version: it's not your typical dry news article, but it's written in a pleasant, engaging and borderline informal style. And, considering how compact the article is, it's surprisingly comprehensive too: it touches on microtonal music, it discusses the instruments (there's a link to an interview with the 'luthier' who built the bass-and-guitar combination), the loop box and what it is for gets some attention, the history of the band gets a paragraph ... in short: very well done, I thought.

I don't know yet if I'll be going to the concert. There's a part of me that would love to go of course, but there's also a part of me, and it's the largest part, that answers100% to the description you gave of yourself: "a solitary animal and it takes a lot to get me to leave my cave voluntarily".

(Last week, someone managed it though: Sigiswald Kuijken — who founded La Petite Bande — and his string quartet. They gave a performance of the Mozart Requiem in a(n excellent) transcription for string quartet. It took place within bicycling distance from where I live, and Kuijken is a brilliant and supremely intelligent musician, an acclaimed music historian and a very, very nice man, so it wasn't too difficult to put on my shoes and go.)

But back to Angine: it'll also depend on the venue that's chosen for the concert. Belgium has a couple of good venues but also plenty of disagreeable places and I don't wanna go to any of those.

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