Music

Microtonal looping alien math rock. It’s niche, but still rock and roll to me. You don’t have to get it. On the other hand, I’m catching them on tour later this fall. Should be fun!

After reading your description I had to look them up, and wow they fuckin rock! I started listening to a set they did on KEXP recently, just to try to get an idea of their sound. But I actually ended up listening to the whole thing. To answer your question, no I don't think they're trolling. They're just a couple of lovely weirdos with mad skills.

Here's a youtube link to the session if anyone else is interested.

Not everything is for everyone, and that's ok.

So, there are good explanations as to why they are popular, and not a joke even slightly.

What AdP have done is combined:

• Pop rock using looping tech and really tight percussion / guitar work
• Some very technical playing, especially using microtonal instruments with a 24 tone scale
• A dada-esque aesthetic to make themselves standout
• Created a lore that allows them to preserve some privacy

So, no, the music is not a joke. It's real music, made by musicians that have been performing together since they were ~13 years old (over a decade at this point). If you listened with a critical ear you might realize that many of their pieces are actually satirizing the clichés of pop-rock music. The aesthetic is made to be fun and get attention.

I've written a bit more about them here: The Summer of Angine de Poitrine.

Oh, and FYI—if this is a joke, it's one of the most successful jokes in nearly 20 years. They smashed the attendance record set by Stevie Wonder in 2009 for the Montreal Jazz Festival.

Not sure there's much to understand.

They are two genuine guys from the extended Montreal punk scene making super diy rock. They like micro tonal stuff, so they make micro tonal rock. They have silly outfits because it's fun to make your friends laugh and be goofy, and also because it protects privacy and creates a cohesive world.

The centralised internet is stupid so algorithms designed for virality and capturing attention picked up on them through some kind of fluke and now they are known throughout the world.

They are great and talented, but there's no reason more people should know of them more than of Lipona, New Junk City, Catbite, Oh The Humanity! or any of the myriad other great punk and adjacent bands out there.

The fact that it's like nothing we've ever seen or heard before is the point, and in today's world of unlimited generic AI-produced slop, it's pretty awesome. You wouldn't be writing a post like this if they were doing the same thing as everyone else.

I get that it's not for everyone. They're not my favorite band or anything. But I appreciate what they're doing because it's fun and surprising, and they still somehow make it catchy.

Music should be fun.

A lot of Lemmings have already tried to explain the appeal of AdP. I'm not going to pile on. Partly because I don't want to beat a dead horse. And partly because I don't "get it" either. Or more specifically, I couldn't get lost in the music the way I wanted to. And I gave it an honest shot. But here's the thing. This isn't the first time that's happened to me. It actually happens to me quite a lot.

As a weekend hobby, I like to get high and just listen. An album, a live set, whatever I can find. Any genre, any era. And why some people connect to music that does nothing for me, and vice reversa, is something I've chewed on for years. It's a massive topic and I won't pretend to have the full answer. But there's a line of research worth mentioning here. Especially given your feeling that this is all a giant joke and everyone's trolling you.

To oversimplify, we don't listen with fresh ears. We learn what music "sounds like" over our whole lives. There's a study on this. Six-month-old babies could pick apart complex Balkan rhythms just fine. By twelve months, that ability had already narrowed to the rhythms they grew up around. Adults raised on Balkan music keep both. The rest of us lose the ear for it. And this just keeps going, every new thing we hear, we hear through all those accumulated biases. Eventually you hit music so far removed from your frame of reference that it barely registers as music at all. For you, that day came. And that's okay.

But if you want to break down that wall, you can get closer. When I find music challenging, I look to its influences. Branches of the tree nearer my own roots. Then I work my way back from there. The catch is you can't go in trying to prove it's bad. For lack of a better phrase, you have to listen with sincerity.

Anyway, thanks for coming to my TED talk. Hope you keep giving new music a chance.

i've read your comments in this thread, and you're definitely a troll and ragebaiter yourself. replying to everyone and figuratively calliing this shit. i guess "rap is not a real music" bait is no longer in style

I think they are really good. I like progressive metal like Tool, Karnivool and Messuggah so it's right up my alley.

I think the costumes and back story is a fun joke. The music is fun too.

They’re aliens from outer space bro

All art is subjective. But there are certain types of art that are less accessible--you either need to have an uncommon taste, or you need to have a deep knowledge of the type of art to appreciate it.

I felt the same way when I first heard jazz bop. Just sounded like noise. Then I played in a jazz band for three years, and by the end of that time, I had a much stronger appreciation for that music. Not because the music was different, but because I could hear more in it than I could years before.

Angine de Poitrine is kinda similar. Some people love it right away, but most of us hear it and it sounds like random noise. But there's a reason they've become popular, and once you get into it a bit more, you can hear some of the cool stuff they do.

For the record, I don't listen to AdP much, but I've been doing music long enough to have an ear to appreciate them.

If you want more info, Charles Cornell does a great breakdown of their music and suggests why people like them so much. Worth a watch.

I think you just don't get it. You can try to enjoy this type of music or not, there's nobody forcing you to.

Like black coffee, it's an acquired taste.

I quite enjoy music that does not fit the traditional western structure, think hard bop, so not having a predicable chorus is a positive thing as far as I'm concerned.

There's nothing wrong with sticking to what you like but the attitude I'm reading in the comments is one of trying to defend a point. That mindset will not expand your taste horizons. I'm really not sure why this is a post if that's the attitude you're taking.

Before you attempt to grok or diss AdP, perhaps get through the following:

• Pink Floyd's 'Ummagumma' — until you like it

• Universal Totem Orchestra's ‘Rituale Alieno’

• Zeni Geva's ‘10,000 Light Years’

• Sasha Garcia's ‘The Cereal Mouse’ (cover of Spastic Ink)

• Blotted Science's ‘Cretaceous Chasm’

• Ruins's ‘Pallaschtom’

• Zu's ‘Carboniferous’

• Sasha Garcia — ‘Mutilate the Stillborn’ (cover of Necrophagist)

• UneXpect's ‘In a Flesh Aquarium’

• Anatoly Nikulin's ‘Russian Music’

• Lightning Bolt's ‘Dead Cowboy @ TAICOCLUB'14’

• Black Pus's ‘Hear No Evil’

• Beskultura's ‘Бес Культ Ура’

• Lanzallamas's ‘Arde la Cúspide EP’

• Mamaleek's ‘Come and See’

• Melt Banana's ‘8 short songs (live at Koloni, 10 år)’ and ‘The Hive’

• Liquidarlo Celuloide's ‘Vértigo Magnético’

• The Armed's ‘Spreading Joy’

• the VAPE's ‘recording a song for a music label Korobushka records’

Dude it’s the jams and it’s moves and it’s fun.

based on your comments here. I actually just don't think you like music. At least, I don't think you're open to new and different genres, and different styles of music. Microtonal is pretty 'strange' for lack of a better term. And that's totally fine.

~~I'm curious what kind of music you do like?~~ Actually, reading more comments, you're a hateful troll who genuinely doesn't appreciate music as an art form.

They're friends of friends and as I understand it this band started out as a joke they did for a show and it was so fun they kept doing it. They have another band that I'm a fan of and you can clearly hear the guitarist's style in that one too. This is just their Funky Microtonal Alien Math Rock Disco band where they speak gibberish, wear funny costumes and make songs vaguely about hotdogs.

Idk if you need to ‘accept’ them as anything lol, they’re just as much rock as Nickelback or the Sex Pistols or Lulu

The rumor I heard was that the outfits started as a trick to let the duo play the same club twice in the same week

Now if it’s just the looping micro-tonal double necked guitar math yeah that’s pretty much a gimmick, but that’s where the art is baybee

The music sounds like LSD fueled song intros looped together without ever reaching a chorus

See, you do get it. There's some great dirty riffs and microtonal scales from the band you can't not look at. Also, not everything needs a chorus.

So, in a time where there's AI generated artwork from drawings, paintings, photos, videos, literature, and even music, we need this kind of absurd weird art because it clearly distinguishes itself as purely human-made.

Also, the technicality behind their music is insane. Have you ever heard of math rock? Essentially, music is built on time signatures or bar which are normally in times of 4, maybe 3 (the 4/4, 3/4 we see on a music sheet next to the clef symbol.) Sometimes the bar will be higher and go up to 16/8 for blues or rock n roll for example.

But Angine de Poitrine use all kinds of fucked up bars and switch several times mid-tune! Using math, essentially, they can switch from having 9 beats, then double to 18, then one third back to 6, then double back up to 12 then divide back into 4 or whatever. That's why it's sometimes hard to follow the beat. You gotta count the number of beats in one bar.

Add to that the microtonal guitar and bass where they add frets for notes between notes, and you now have several new notes that don't follow the standard octaves.

With the silly costumes and characters on top, which is fun because they don't take themselves seriously, which makes it very lighthearted in these very serious times, it really helps disconnect from the harsh reality.

So it's a combination of all that.

No, you got it. You just don't vibe with it. I don't vibe with TOOL. I also don't vibe with AdP. "Rock" is a stupidly broad genre that seems to include anything with an electric guitar.

Elevator music existed before it got installed in elevators. It is, in fact, music that people enjoyed.

They make weird abstract music and wear costumes. I don't there's anything to get, but for sure it's not a joke or an ironic internet thing. It's just a subgenre that has been pretty popular in local scenes for more than a decade, but had evaded the attention of the general public until now.

Musicians tend to like it because it's actually very technical. It may sound repetitive if you gloss over the details but it's packed with trick-shots and complications, which are necessary because of the weird setup they have. It's a whole brainy thing about finding your way out of self-imposed constraints.

Some people, myself included, find diatonic music in 4/4 predictable and boring. This is the sort of music that appeals to people who know a lot about music and music theory, precisely because it skirts the edges of the "rules" and subverts expectations while having a sort of internal consistency.

I'll compare it to stand-up comedy. I'm a huge fan of Norm Macdonald, but I know plenty of people who don't think he's funny because of his deadpan delivery and rambling shaggy dog setups. But that's precisely what makes him so funny and why other comedians consider him a genius. He subverts the "rules" of comedy to create something refreshing in a landscape of stuff that all feels the same. It's easy to understand the appeal when you're well versed in the "rules", but it just seems chaotic when you aren't.

AdP is like that. The weird time signatures, microtonality, and deviation from the chorus-verse structure make them very interesting to people who understand rhythm, scales, and structure. If you don't have a solid understanding of those things, you aren't going to understand what they're doing or why they're doing it, any more than you'll understand why Norm Macdonald tells a rambling 10 minute story that culminates in a corny pun unless you understand the principles of comedy.

I listened to them recently and unfortunately for me a) life is too short or b) there's too much music to discover (choose one) to keep listening to something that doesn't win me over on first try. That's my life long experiment, so I don't argue about this selective process.

Well, I for one disagree with your assessment, but I SINCERELY thank you for posting it. I have a new thing to enjoy. This band is awesome!

these guys are amazing. Pyramid heads plays guitar, bass and do remix with his foot... a also do vocals