By now you’ll have seen endless clips of the Angine De Poitrine live set recorded by KEXP, which went viral after in February. You might even have read my exclusive interview with guitarist/bassist Khn – the very first conversation dissecting the enigmatic musician’s background and his approach to tone and effects.
Given their meteoric rise over 2026, cementing their name as the music industry’s biggest and most unexpected success story, it would be all too easy to dismiss their microtonal math rock as a fad masked by quirky imagery – boosted their claim of being 333-year-old time travelers inspired by a solemn choir of proboscis monkeys from Borneo.
Cosmic primates and temporal displacement aside, microtonal music has been around a lot longer than most people think. And just like anything that becomes hugely popular in a matter of months – to the point where it feels like it’s inescapably everywhere – there can often be a handful of misconceptions.
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It’s an out-of-tune guitar
“The most common one is that a microtonal guitar is an out-of-tune guitar,” says Dr. Tolgahan Çoğulu, a professor at Istanbul Technical University and Turkish Music State Conservatory. “However, if people knew about the harmonic series and just intonation, they might instead see the standard guitar as an out-of-tune instrument.
“For example, major thirds are clearly high or ‘out of tune’ on standard guitars and pianos, when compared with just intonation. I discussed this in my 2017 video Major Third Problem Of All Guitars In The World.”
Çoğulu notes how a microtone is often incorrectly labeled a quartertone. “A semitone is divided into 100 equal units, and Alexander John Ellis named each of the pieces a cent in the 19th century,” he says. “But a natural major third is approximately 14 cents lower than the equal-tempered major third”.
Then there’s the idea that microtonal guitars are notoriously difficult to play – something which the founder of the world’s first microtonal guitar department, opened in 2014 at Istanbul Technical University, fundamentally disagrees with.
It’s a new concept
To some, microtonal might feel like a relatively new thing, but its roots stretch surprisingly far back into history. Çoğulu points to the research of Harry Partch in his book Genesis Of A Music, which traced the lineage back to ancient China around 2600 BCE, when the musician Ling Lun cut a series of bamboo pipes of different lengths and generated a sequence of pitches through successive perfect fifths.
He also underlines how Pythagoras Of Samos used a monochord to generate perfect fifths in ancient Greece in the 5th century BCE.
Experimentation with the music system stretched into the middle ages, with theorists such as Aristoxenus, Ptolemy, Al-Kindi, Al-Farabi and Ibn Sina investigating different systems of tuning and intervals. It was a phenomenon happening around the world. inspiring elements of Indian raga music, Persian dastgah, Arabic makam, Turkish makam and Balinese Gamelan.
These are all styles that Çoğulu says “developed their own pitch systems and melodic practices outside 12-tone equal temperament [TET] over centuries.” So when did all of this cross over into the world of guitar playing?
It’s only just being applied to guitar
In his History Of Microtonal Guitar video, Çoğulu refers to the 1829 arrival of Perronet Thompson’s Enharmonic guitar in London as the official place of birth. “This was followed by the first movable-fret guitar, developed in Paris by luthier René Lacôte around 1845,” he continues, emphasizing that further arrivals came in the 20th century largely thanks to composers who were writing music based on 24 tones per octave.
The Turkish professor names Alois Haba’s Suite No.2 For Quarter-Tone Guitar composed in 1947 – a piece he’s performed himself – as “a particularly interesting and important work in the microtonal guitar repertoire.”
Which brings us to the big question on everyone’s lips. Why exactly is microtonal music having its moment in the sun in 2026? “It’s exciting to see a major revival thanks, in part, to bands such as King Gizzard and Angine de Poitrine,” says Çoğulu. He feels it’s also because a lot of people seem to be getting bored of tradition and “becoming more open to exploring new pitches in rock music.”
The phenomenon is particularly tangible in America and Europe, places that have long been dominated by the 12-TET system, heard time and time again.
There are only a few artists playing microtonal music
“Turkish people grew up listening to Anatolian rock from the 1960s and 1970s, so we’re familiar with some of the sounds heard on King Gizzard’s Flying Microtonal Banana,” the professor says.
“What’s remarkable is that King Gizzard has brought this kind of sound to the attention of a much wider international audience. As for Angine De Poitrine, their combination of math rock and 24-tone equal temperament is particularly refreshing – it demonstrates how microtonality can be integrated into new contemporary musical languages.”
If you’re looking to sink your teeth into more microtonal music, Çoğulu has homework for you, and it’s quite the list: Partch Ensemble, Mercury Tree, Brendan Byrnes, Sevish, Gabriel Marin, Maddie Ashman, Stephen Weigel, Catherine Lamb, Stephen Altoft, Julian Woods, Dave Fiuczynsky, Philip Gerschlauer, Dsilton, Matthew Sheeran, Anna-Maria Hefele, Rami Olsen, Levi McClain, Subraag Singh, Daragh Black Hynes, Matt Pollock, John Gzowski, Sina Shirazi, Radu Varga, Alper Yakın, Hakan Görener and Decolonize Your Mind Society.
As for the future, he believes these more curious and otherworldly sounds will only become more and more integrated into the musical tapestry that stretches across every corner of the globe.
“For a long time, the main problem was not a lack of ideas – it was a lack of instruments, repertoire, performers and education,” he argues. “Today, all four are developing simultaneously.”
