“The guitar gets funny questions because it looks like a dead body”: Angine de Poitrine have to transport their double-necked guitar in a sleeping bag – which causes problems at airport security
Angine de Poitrine have spent the last few years building one of the strangest cult followings in experimental guitar music: microtonal riffs, looping chaos, papier-mâché masks and a ridiculous custom double-neck guitar/bass that looks like it escaped from a fever dream.
The instrument has become such a key part of the duo’s identity that they’ve learned to live with one unavoidable problem: nobody actually makes a case for something that bizarrely proportioned.
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Speaking to The Guardian following the release of their second album, Vol II, the duo reveal that they’ve resorted to transporting the instrument inside a sleeping bag while travelling – a decision that apparently raises more than a few eyebrows at airport security.
While their masks usually pass through customs without much issue, Khn says the oversized guitar tends to invite more concern.
“The guitar gets funny questions because I carry it in a sleeping bag and it looks like a dead body,” says the guitarist.
The exaggerated double-neck build has already become central to Angine de Poitrine’s whole aesthetic. Earlier this year, the duo described it as “the perfect choice to make fun of guitar heroes”, a fairly natural extension of a band whose entire idea was to “assume a bit of a satirical approach to rock music in general”.
Klek and Khn continued playing together through their teens before officially forming Angine de Poitrine in their early twenties. “For a while, we didn’t take it seriously,” says drummer Klek. “It was just like playing with Legos.”
“Well, maybe that’s true for you,” Khn replies. “I was 12 when I picked up a guitar and I instantly became very serious about it. I always had the intention to make a band.”
That attachment to the band’s original homemade world still remains intact, even as their audience grows. The pair say they have no plans to replace their battered papier-mâché masks with cleaner or more polished versions.
“People have fallen in love with the band as it’s always been,” says Khn. “So we’re not gonna change everything [because] we have a bigger budget now. We’re emotionally attached to our old beaten-up costumes that have been in car accidents and are full of snot. We think people love the fact that you can feel they have lived.”
As for the music itself, the duo say most songs emerge through long stretches of improvisation and trial-and-error.
“We improvise and make a lot of crap, then you have a little spark,” sasy Khn. “A lot of the songs on the second album, I found one riff that’s got something to it, then you build from that.”
Building loops repeatedly creates “a feeling of anxiousness”, adds Klek. “We’re always playing with that feeling, and tension and release.”
Khn also notes how using a loop pedal live keeps them in line: “If I start from this idea, I have to find a coherent way to move away from it,” he says. “[Otherwise we] have a tendency to make songs that go from A to Z without coming back to A or B.”]
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Source: www.guitar-bass.net
