Space-faring, time-traveling alien brothers, Klek and Khn de Poitrine, touched down in New York City on September 9th and 10th, 2026, boring under the streets to the subterranean Le Poisson Rouge club for two tightly packed, sold-out nights. Despite their shared 333 years exploring the universe, tonight marked the brothers’ first arrival in the city for a night of experimental rhythms and foreign contact. With a capacity of around 700, the space offered an intimate look at the otherworldly lifeforms. Outside the venue stood lines of black-and-white polka-dotted cladden humans, with a small group of stragglers waiting to see if some last-minute tickets would slip through the cracks and become available. Some local, some as far as Argentina, in for another gig and wanting to hear the aliens under Greenwich Village.
Opening our minds first would be the musical stylings of Annie-Claude Deschênes. Hailing from Quebec, she has been in the local music scene for years, with multiple successful musical projects, including Duchess Says and PyPy. Part concert performance, part performance art, her set challenged what a typical concert consists of, matching tonight’s headliners perfectly. Built on synths and drum machines, her retro-futuristic aesthetic extends beyond her analog music into live camcorder stage visuals aimed by her fellow performer, who keeps the lens on her whether she's on stage, in the crowd, or behind the keys.
Performing off of “LES MANIÈRES DE TABLE” (table manners), her wardrobe of a cutlery-stabbed jacket continued the album's sampled cutlery sounds and theming. Tracks consisted of setting a table on side stage and pulling up two crowd members to enjoy a served dessert, checking in on them between songs to see how they enjoyed their Jello. Deschênes also began walking the crowd, serving whipped cream, followed by a waiter handing out Jello desserts from a silver platter to desperate open hands looking for sustenance. Her performance blurred where the edge of the stage fell, showing that, for her, the stage does not separate her from her spectators. Extending the performance down through the crowd, across the venue floor, sweeping everyone into her performance as an active participant, she holds more of the crowd's attention than any opener can dream to. Deschênes is an incredible performer who delivers a uniquely engaging set of music, opening the confines of typical concert performance to be closer to live theater.
Carefully placing one foot in front of the other, beings known as Angine de Poitrine slowly step into their prepared stage locations. Cooing to each other with a conversation of movement, flailing arms, and guttural, distorted grunting, they’d turn to the crowd and growl their name, flashing their symbol of flat hands touched at the index and thumb to form triangles. Loops of hitting drums and bass signal ‘Angor’s production as Khn layers runs of notes from the neck of his bass on top of melodies from the neck of his guitar. The custom-built, double-necked microtonal monstrosity offers double the notes of normal guitars and bass that are paired and looped in live recordings captured by Khn with his precise footwork across his vast collection of guitar pedals. Paired with odd time signatures from Klek's rhythm machine arms, the two break the three instruments out of the conventional sounds they've been restricted to. This creates a spectrum of unused parts of human music that these two aliens piece back together in a way no human mind has been able to come up with.
Originally, the masks hid the faces of the anonymous performers deeply ingrained in the Quebec underground rock scene, allowing them to release new music and have crowds not roll their eyes at familiar faces, but they also serve as a source of constant entertainment for the crowd as two hyper-focused musicians hone in on their craft. The ritual of transformation also serves to set their artistic vision, one of challenging norms in music, appearance, and performance, and in doing so attracting a wide range of humans from all sorts of backgrounds who each got their earworm from these alien invaders. In the crowd next to me was Micha, a younger woman who had seen these two at King Gizzard’s three-day music festival, Field of Dreams, where she recalled, “I was obsessed; they totally changed my life...they're my new favorite thing.” Additionally, standing next to me was Brad, an older gentleman avoiding the mosh pit who had become a fan through YouTube and couldn’t wait to experience the music live he’d heard performed so many times before.
No surprise to anyone, an act like this quickly learns to adapt to hiccups in their show, and after shredding through ‘Ababa Hotel,’ Khn held up his snapped guitar string, needing replacement from their guitar tech. Aside from the language barrier of Khn’s grunts and frantic arm waves complicating their communication, Klek had begun beating his drum. Unable to leave the call unanswered, Khn continued to play on the present strings while the replacement was desperately fed through the guitar’s body and neck by their tech. The improvised jam exemplified the fun experimentation of the band’s music. Watching Klek experiment with drum patterns live, switching the rhythm as he wanted to hear something new, and watching how Khn played between those open spaces of sound was such an impressive and exciting listen. It felt like being invited to an early recording session.
‘Sarniezz’ would continue on despite the failure of the replacement string. Audibly, many of the notes contained in the range of the string were lost, but damn if the performance wasn’t any less impressive. Never losing an ounce of power or rhythm despite the completely different feeling of his left hand, the song just became an alternate version of an already out-there piece of music. Watching them charge on anyway put the crowd under their influence, uniting us against the string as chants of “Fuck that string” rang out. A successful replacement after, and a smaller improvised jam during it, led into a perfectly performed ‘Fabienk’ and closed with the highest energy from the crowd with ‘Sherpa.’
Angine de Poitrine is an absolutely incredible act. The humor and absurdity of their alien form is not lost upon them, as their music is a place to get out of the bounds of this world and step into another. The crowd was constantly grunting at the two aliens, eliciting responses in their native tongue, and after every song, pledging allegiance with a sea of triangular hands. The self-painted alien skin applied at the top of every performance slowly wears down as they perform throughout the night; sweat and heat from the fully covered costume and papier-mache heads shear the layer of polka-dotted skin, revealing something more human beneath. Maybe the more time they spend around us, the more they become like us, and the longer we spend with them, the more alien we become. If their music doesn’t land the first time, I’m willing to bet that kind of radically empathic message will linger with you if you give it a shot.
As they continue their meteoric invasion of Earth, their performances grow in size, with their next scheduled date in New York at a venue double the size of this one. The interplanetary brothers will also make their US TV performance debut this Monday night on The Tonight Show. They’ll continue touring throughout North America and Europe until the end of the year, playing sold-out audiences across the continents. It’s unbelievably exciting to have such absurd talent welcomed by so many people, and it is evidence of an ever-changing and widely diverse scene to come for many years. Alien invasion is exactly what we need, and I welcome them with open arms.
SETLIST: Angor / Yor Zarad / Tamebsz / Mata Zyklek / Ababa Hotel / Sarniezz / Fabienk / Sherpa
