For a strange week in April my algorithm feed was full of videos, commentary and analysis about a curious French-Canadian music duo called Angine de poitrine [1] who, it seems, have washed ashore upon the cultural zeitgeist.
Perhaps it is merely that my endless wanderings through the musicians internet have biased my perception and have only just momentarily shone a light on this thing and I am, as usual, a few steps behind in noticing. And certainly, I am in no good position to comment with meaning on the music itself, a microtonal eruption that has been described by others as noise, dissonance, or unlistenable.
I quite like it—and I bought an album and added it to my everyday playlist. I’m listening to it as I write this, in fact…
Which is all for me to say that what I may be more qualified to comment on is the creative leap that such experimental projects embody. Angine de poitrine is the doing of something that I have merely being writing and thinking about: bending the rules, creating something unique, and experimenting outside of the traditional definition of marketable, sellable, commercial art.
Succeeding, to boot.
And while I’ll caveat that some of that aforementioned commentary I’ve seen on the duo has (unfairly, I think) framed the effort as merely a weird marketing gimmick, I would argue that such accusations miss the point entirely: that there is a tension in the heart of every true artist, trying to stand out and do something novel while simultaneously fitting in just enough to survive in a world that values standardization and commercial viability.
Occasionally someone figures out that balance and it is a glorious cacophony.
References
- ↑ . Angine de poitrine. https://anginedepoitrine.com/.
Terms FROm this POSt
- algorithm
- The modern internet in all its forms is far too large for people to fully manage anymore without the help of automated systems. Any time an unseen calculation weighing our public profiles against what an app, website, or service chooses to show us, one of these automated systems is at work behind the scenes recommending product, ideas, politics, and friends. The invisible hand of fate has turned into a digital calculation so big we can’t understand it, and so complex it is often hauntingly accurate. If you are not afraid of the algorithm and what it has done to our society, you are probably not paying enough attention.
- microtonal
- I think anyone who has seen a piano can understand that the keys represent the familiar notes–A, B, C, etc–but musically the array of black and white actually represent a thing called semitones. Yet, there is a lot of sonic space between those semitone notes, and so half way between semitones come quarter-tones (unrepresented on a standard keyboard) and then when one moves at even smaller increments we really stop meaningfully measuring and call those spaces between the spaces microtones.
- value
- I use this word a lot on this site but I’m not always referring to cash money. There are many ways to find value in something: emotional, nostalgia, spiritual, environmental, social, and countless other personally meaningful ways. I do find the assumption that everything always comes down to coins in the pocket, but that might just be being disappointed with spending fifty years watching the capitalism struggle to deliver on anything meaningfully human.
