The Drumming Behind Angine de Poitrine

The Drumming Behind Angine de Poitrine: How Klek Holds the Music Together Across Shifting Time Signatures

Since the KEXP session dropped in February, Angine de Poitrine have gone from zero to over 14 million views and a sold-out European tour. The band is masks, papier-mâché and polka dots — but that isn't why 14 million people stay. It's the music. And what holds the music together isn't the microtonal double-neck — it's the drummer.

Who is Klek?

Klek de Poitrine — or rather: the person playing Klek — is one of two anonymous musicians from Saguenay, Quebec. He and guitarist Khn have played together for over 20 years. Angine de Poitrine started in 2019 as a joke and stuck around.

A detail that often gets missed: it's Klek himself — the drummer — who built the microtonal guitar by sawing the frets off an old guitar and moving them onto another. He isn't "the drummer who sits in". He's a co-composer in a band where the entire sound is built around instruments he constructed.

The trick: Same loop, different time signatures

All of Angine de Poitrine's music rests on a Boss RC-600 looper. Khn loops microtonal guitar lines in layers. The loop length is locked for the duration of a song — and a MIDI cable syncs the looper's clock to Klek's click in his headphones. Both musicians play to exactly the same pulse.

But the time signature on top of the loop isn't locked. That changes.

A concrete example from the song "Sarniezz": the loop is 48 eighth notes long. In 12/8 that's four bars. When Klek pivots to 4/4, the same 48 eighth notes become twelve bars. The loop is mathematically identical — the only thing that has changed is the time signature the drums frame it in. To the listener, it feels as if the whole music has shifted.

This isn't ornamentation. It's the entire compositional idea. And it's the drummer painting one meter frame after another over the same underlying math.

What this means for his role behind the kit

Klek has to stay absolutely locked to the click, because the looper's math doesn't tolerate drift. At the same time, he chooses what time signature the audience will perceive — an active choice he makes through where he places accents and how he phrases the bass drum. And he makes micro-adjustments in real time as Khn adds new loops.

Reviewers describe his playing as "sewing-machine needle drumming", "in-the-pocket" and "tight, pulsing". The metaphors are mechanical — but the playing isn't stiff. It's mechanics in service of musical illusion. The style is shaped by prog, math rock and jazz rock, with fluid shifts between 5/4, 12/8 and other odd time signatures, and an intensity several reviewers have compared to the rawness of punk.

What you can take from this as a drummer

You don't have to play math rock to learn from Klek. A few concrete things:

• Practice playing the same figure in different time signatures. Take the Sarniezz trick and try it yourself: a 48-eighth-note figure first as four bars of 12/8, then as twelve bars of 4/4. Notice how the accents have to move — and how the listener's perception changes completely without the notes themselves changing.
• The click is a tool, not a cage. Most drummers train themselves not to drift from the click. Klek shows you can also use the click as a grid and choose which time signature to paint over it.
• Tightness isn't boring. It isn't fills that make Klek's playing interesting — it's phrasing, accenting and pulse. A tight groove allowed to sit without ornamentation can be the most impactful thing in a whole song.
• A drummer can be more than the throne. Klek wrote the compositional concept and built the instrument. It's worth asking what your own place in your band actually could be.

Watch the clip with a drummer's ears

As you watch the clip below, listen for two things: how the pulse never moves, and how the time signature still constantly does.