...For several generations, going to the movies was not just escapism; it was like watching a new Western canon being composed in real time. ......After Avengers: Endgame came out, I never again heard my students quote a new movie in class. The canon has closed. Nowadays, when I say “I hear [a new movie] is good”, I mean “someone online wrote this was good.” People don’t actually talk about movies anymore.To add salt to the wound, the lovers of mainstream film who invited you to watch Casablanca and Singing in the Rain have been replaced by people who are arguing about the in-world consistency of the 9th Star Wars/Halloween/Aliens movie. Debates about the filmic canon have given way to debates about specific mythologies created so that studios can keep making movies with the same main characters....
Wednesday, May 06, 2026
A Farewell to Cinema from a Christian Who Loves It at Mere Orthodoxy seems like an archetypal contemporary American Christian thinkpiece about the state of an art in the 21st century but what is that state?
Lucas Brar has made a Bach-style fugue on the main riff from Michael Jackson's "Smooth Criminal"
Its fun, go check it out. Brar diagrams what goes on in the fugue as it moves along
I like that he inverts the theme in one of the middle entries. Of course there's a stretto because the riff from "Smooth Criminal" so very obviously lends itself to stretto (in three voices).
I've been saying for years the boundaries between "pop" and "classical" are far more permeable and negotiable than snobs on various sides of largely constructed divides make things out to be. Sure, the fugue can be heard as a novelty piece but I think it would be unwise to hear it as "just" a novelty piece.
Tuesday, May 05, 2026
Angine de Poitrine, because Wenatchee The Hatchet was going to have to have some kind of post about a microtonal progressive rock duo from Quebec
No offense meant to Rush fans but it is nice to be able to say that there's more to prog rock from Canada than just Rush. :)
The chain of introduction for me can be charted like this--Rick Beato featured them to silence the flood of "Why haven't you featured .... ?" Bryan Townsend shared the KEXP performance at his blog.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zO8bt94-ybg
https://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2026/03/todays-listening-angine-de-poitrine.html
“They describe themselves as a Mantra-Rock Dada
Pythago-Cubist Orchestra, and the band name translates to ‘angina of the
chest’”: The microtonal music theory behind viral math-rockers Angine de
Poitrine
…
Angine de Poitrine’s
grooves are immediately distinctive. Sarniezz is in regular old 4/4 with a
triplet-y 12/8 feel, but it has peculiar accents. Mata Zylek is in 10/4.
Fabienk is either in very strangely-grouped 7/4 or conventionally-grouped 28/4.
Finally, Sherpa is in 17/4.
The band constructs
these wonky grooves using a loop pedal. Khn plays both the bass and all of the
guitar parts on a Stratocaster-style double-neck guitar that’s half electric
guitar and half bass, and he can only do that by layering them with the looper.
This creates serious restrictions in song structures and arrangement choices.
Once the loop is going, the only change you can make is to either add layers or
mute them.
…
The loops’ constraints
have several musical benefits. The songs have to focus tightly on a single
idea, rather than wandering aimlessly. Because every song has to have
essentially the same structure, it forces the band to be creative with the
details. The loops also make the songs somewhat predictable, and that is a big
help for listeners struggling to parse the odd time signatures and unusual
tuning.
…
In classical music theory books you may come across the concept of the passacaglia. The gist is that there is a ground bass and the form is an approach to variation technique. Anything and everything may happen around the ground bass but the ground bass never goes away.
Defined very loosely, Angine de Poitrine can be heard as contemporary prog rock microtonal exponents of new possibilities in a venerable old form known as the passacaglia.
Traditionally defined as being in triple
meter there really isn’t any reason you can’t have a passacaglia in 5/4 or 17/4
or whatever meter you want. Strip away
the classical music genre and what it means is that jamming by way of riff
bashing goes back centuries. Calling
what you do jamming over a riff-bashing exercise a passacaglia is a long-standing
tradition and it’s a fun form to work with.
At the same time, we also don’t need to be especially snobby about the
idea that jamming over a riff-bashing groove in classical music is somehow
ontologically different from the same thing being done by a prog rock power duo.
It’s easier to catch the grooves in their work than it would
be to follow some of the forms used by Alois Haba (String
Quartet No. 3 from 1922) or Ivan Wyschnegradsky. I lean slightly more toward the string quartets
of Ben Johnston and the guitar music of Lou Harrison than Haba or Wyschnegradsky
(although the latter’s 4th
piece from Op. 22 kind of has a proto-prog rock vibe to it for me).
Microtonality has been getting played with for a bit more
than a century now and it’s been regarded as a theoretical possibility for
literally centuries. I came across Anton
Reicha’s Treatise
on Melody (HT Kyle Gann) and
therein discovered that Reicha
extolled the use of quarter tones in performances. The thing about microtonality that is fun is
that it’s not 12-tone equal temperament but there’s no real constraints on what
not-12TET you go with. You could do
quarter tones or you could do extended just intonation. You could do fifth-tone and sixth-tone tuning
systems like Haba did. As a guitarist
with no access to bowed string instruments the closest I could get to doing
something microtonal or using extended just intonation would be trying to write
a whole set of works using only natural harmonics because nothing is more
natural than using only natural harmonics.
The internet being what it is, looks like someone went to
the effort to do some transcriptions.
One of the advantages of riff-bashing and loop work is that
transcription can be easier if you know what loops keep recurring. Not that I would personally find it easy to
transcribe quarter tone prog rock but there are transcriptions on Youtube.
Mata Zyklek (Angine De Poitrine) transcription
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAtWy-s0FOY
Sarniezz (Angine de Poitrine) transcription
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZW_NV-RIoc
Kyle Gann once wrote somewhere that although he did like quarter tone music he found that his capacity to listen to it in large chunks was limited. If the twelve-tone equal temperament tuning system is artificial than slicing every half step in half is twice as artificial, right? Still, I have heard music built around quarter tones that I've enjoyed and it's been fun to listen to this duo lately. I'll reiterate a sentiment I shared over at The Music Salon, I'll take this duo's music over the annoying four-chord soul bro balladeers I've been stuck hearing on mainstream radio.
Monday, May 04, 2026
Adam Gussow's Beyond the Crossroads quotes Francis Grimké's 1892 address on the state of Afro-American clergy from a Crossway compendium. It's now possible to go straight to the source, but let's also rabbit trail on New Calvinism
In Adam Gussow's Beyond the Crossroads: The Devil and the Blues Tradition, he mentions Francis Grimké 's 1892 critique of his fellow African American peers in pastoral offices. Gussow cites a book edited by Thabiti Anyabwile and John Piper.
The Faithful Preacher: Recapturing the Vision of Three Pioneering African-American Pastors
By Thabiti Anyabwile, Foreword by John Piper
https://www.crossway.org/books/the-faithful-preacher-tpb/
ISBN-10: 1-58134-827-4
ISBN-13: 978-1-58134-827-9
ISBN-UPC: 9781581348279
Published: March 31, 2007
It turns out that now you can go straight to the source but I'll get to that after a few rabbit trails.
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