Avant Garde

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.