a minute and forty-four seconds
i was ~30 minutes into my scrolling before i was teleported into someone else's viewfinder at the newport jazz festival on july 31st. it was august 9th, for me, when i watched angine de poitrine play mata zyklek. my wife got caught in the doom scroll with me, and over the next minute and forty-four seconds we watched a psychedelic rock duo decked out in black and white polka dot jumpsuits jam out. we were hooked.
within 15 minutes i hopped between bandsintown, axs, dice and stubhub looking for tickets to their next show (advertisers, take notes). everything was sold out: resellers controlled the market now.
a month of refreshing
i wasn't willing to swallow the 5x markup, so i took the most sane route i could: event notification emails from stubhub, and refreshing ticket prices on the daily for a month straight. i got lucky on september 8th: $135 a ticket, all in. my wife and i will be seeing them on november 18th, a day after our shared birthday.
only ever the bass layer
blame my mom (but not really) for putting me in classical piano lessons in grammar school, on the family piano she played as a kid. 7 years later i was begging to play the guitar instead: that was a cooler instrument than the piano, right? then the trumpet for marching band, then the tuba, because that was a cooler instrument than the trumpet. i took the tuba to the pep band at manhattan college, and as president of the band i held auditions for a drummer who is now my wife.
in april 2012, just before graduating high school, i was hunched over my laptop watching a youtube livestream of coachella when tUnE-yArDs opened my eyes (and mouth) to the loop pedal. merrill garbus built an entire song from nothing in front of a festival crowd. it felt too advanced for my classical piano, half-self-taught guitarist mind. the most i ever made was a foundational bass loop, and i never layered anything on top of it.
the challenge i failed
i had this inner challenge running through my mind: the first time i heard their music would be when i saw them live. it was a huge fail on my end. i pressed play on vol. ii on september 25th, and my apple music stats for the month were never the same again.
- 611 minutes of angine de poitrine, all in the last 6 days of september
- 508 of them on vol. ii, which only has 6 songs. 4 of them made my top 5
- 25 plays of fabienk, 19 of mata zyklek, 18 of sarniezz, 16 of utzp
- ∞ stubhub checks, explainer videos, reviews and reactions
the stage was set: a new temporary musical obsession, explainer videos about math rock time signatures, loops i wanted to see instead of only hearing through headphones, and a weekend with a bit more free time than i anticipated. time to call in my little coding robot.
where it started
my initial prompt feels like a novel when i read it back; it was full dictation, mind you. trimmed here, not reworded:
A fun project that I thought I could pick up for the weekend, maybe even finish it a little earlier, who knows, but either way, I would like to visually analyze the music of Angine de Poitrine since I believe there is a good way to depict all of the different layers of music you are hearing at the exact same time, specifically from the bass and the guitar, since the drum set is live and not looped. […]
The goal here would be to visually see it on a timeline graph so, like in essence, like as the timer and as you horizontally scroll through a song, you can see each layer being turned on off or reused or all layered at the exact same time. […] for a fun little tidbit, I was thinking of having instead of it being just a left to right line scroll, we can do a circular radial scroll close, these can then just be different dots which are very much a representation of the visually and their music. […]
I've watched a few YouTube videos about this, but I haven't seen this type of visualization attempted, so I think this can be my lane to do so.
four videos and an article
before drawing anything: david bruce on their math rhythms, levi mcclain's explainer, david bennett on the quarter tones, oliver gearing on why the microtones work, and tnocs on how much of the band is something you watch. the useful part was how much they agreed. every one of them describes the same machine: one steady grid of eighth notes, loops that are whole multiples of the first loop, and drums that change how the grid is counted without ever changing the grid.
khn said it plainly in an interview with guitar world: there are no pre-recorded parts, every line is played live, and every loop is one to four times the length of the first.
same pulses, different count
this is the trick the whole page is built around. sarniezz's first loop is 48 eighth notes. for the first half of the song klek counts them in 3s (12/8). at bar 65 he counts the exact same eighths in 2s (4/4). nothing in the looper speeds up or slows down. near the end, one bar of 11/8, a 4/4 bar plus 3 extra eighths, shifts everything 3 eighths against the drums.
khn adds a second layer on top: quarter tones, the notes that sit between the frets of a normal guitar. his double neck has extra frets for them. in everything below they're the half-filled dots.
no score, a lot of careful fans
there's no official score. what exists is fan transcription, and one of them was exactly what this needed: a songsterr tab of the kexp performance that gives each loop its own track and notes, bar by bar, when khn records, mutes and unmutes it, synced to the video. 12 people have worked on it since february. most of the credit goes to joe e, who rewrote all the guitar and bass and labeled every loop. a musescore transcription of the same performance agreed on the tempo (174) and the length (4:50).
i'll be honest, i would have probably spent the better part of two weeks trying to train claude to become a master at tablature transcription, because my ears would never be able to do this.
utzp was my first pick, it's my favorite, but nobody has logged its loops past the intro. so sarniezz went first: 179 bars, 1,691 eighth notes, five loops, ten recording passes.
one line per loop
the first version i got back was pretty simple visually, but it blew me away. it's a staff, like sheet music: a line for each of the looper's five tracks, plus the parts played by hand, with the notes sliding under a fixed playhead. hatched is recording, solid is playing, hollow is muted. the hollow dots matter. a muted loop doesn't stop, it keeps turning silently, and in the tab every loop but two comes back exactly where a running loop would be.
the bug was a dot
qa and qc is where i shine: i love getting lost in the weeds of breaking things to fix them. my self-assumed nickname is bat-man, eagle-eye, and during my 4th round of editing, my bat ears weren't deceiving me:
I feel like the live guitar by hand gets out of sync after bar 25 because it feels like the video plays it sooner than the scrubber
it was. the tab was right: it writes each note's length with the dot already counted, and claude's code counted it again, so any note after a dotted note landed late in its bar. in bar 26, an accent that sounds 7 eighths in was drawn at 10, about half a second late. the fix moved notes in 113 of the song's 179 bars, and every loop now repeats note for note. i live to keep this nickname another day.
follow his hands
Think it would be a neat addition as yellow is the bands 3rd color
yellow is khn's hands: whatever he's playing himself right then. that includes every recording pass, because he plays it live as the looper captures it. once it starts repeating, it goes white. he plays guitar or bass, never both at once, so only one thing is ever yellow. the shade is theirs, #f7b84b, lifted from their bandcamp page.
the same data, turned
then the radial view from the brief. each loop is a ring of its own notes, turning once per pass, with now at 12 o'clock. a 96 eighth loop turns at half the speed of a 48, so you can watch them phase against each other. the first version had the rings in the wrong order and labels nobody could read:
I'm not sure what 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 means
fair. they said l1 to l5 and the font made an l look like a 1. now it reads high to low from the outside in: the meter, the guitar loops, live guitar, the bass loop, live bass, and the drums at the center. they also stuttered around 2:00, because the hand-tapped bar times wobbled by as much as 11% from one bar to the next. smoothing them to a steady tempo took that under half a percent.
honest numbers
| the page matches the tab | essentially all of it. an independent audit checked every loop event, bar and note position against the raw tab. |
|---|---|
| the timing matches the video | every bar within 80 ms, most within 30. an eighth note here is 172 ms. |
| the tab matches what khn played | my estimate is 90 to 95%. the big structure checks out against the video and the analysts; the doubt sits in two flagged spots (the ? marks) and the exact moment of each mute. |
an alternate universe
while sarniezz is the only song that's fully dissected, my real goal is getting utzp (my favorite listen, at the moment) and fabienk in the rotation too. even now as i watch it, it makes sense, and at the same time it still feels crazy that this composition works the way it does.
in an alternate universe, the duo resembles a version of us: a guitarist who only recorded bass layers, who found their drummer to doom scroll on tiktok with.