From the first moment I heard Pere Ubu’s “30 Seconds Over Tokyo/Heart of Darkness” single in the mid-70s I was hooked. Their debut long-player The Modern Dance confirmed their place in my head as one of the most exciting and unpredictably weird bands on the planet. I wasn’t certain as to what I was listening to I just knew it went places that few rock bands at the time had the balls to go. In the wildness of their sound there were indelible hooks that made the complexity and delirium still quite accessible to someone, like myself, who had little patience for something that people might term “art-rock.” And front-man David Thomas was a mountain of manic energy that seemed to on the verge of blowing its lid like a meat volcano.

Pere Ubu took its name from “Ubu Roi,” the mad king protagonist created by the French absurdist playwright, novelist and poet Alfred Jarry and, like Jarry, the band deranges our senses in order to force us to see things anew or destroys and re-arrange them in bizarre new sonic shapes. The end result is that the listener is thrown off-kilter and one’s attention is heightened in order to regain some sense of balance. The music cannot be ignored. It engages and brings you into the moment.

In the mid-90s Thomas formed David Thomas and two pale boys (Keith Moliné and Andy Diagram), a self-described “avant-garde traditional folk music from the future performed with post-dance technology” trio that continues Thomas’s exploration of the outer edges of music. Their doctrine is a riff on the Zen teaching that the best way to control your horse is to give it an open field.

Self-expression is evil. The 2pbs engage in “spontaneous song generation.” Everybody knows what a song is. It’s no great mystery. The freedom of jazz in its heyday was based on the strictness of the blues structure. Rules provide freedom. After a verse comes a chorus. Everybody knows what a chorus has to accomplish. It can, therefore, be invented, on the spot, with confidence. Countless nanoseconds exist—more than enough time—for musicians to organize themselves so as to deliver the Good Stuff (structure, focus & dynamics… poetry, vision & passion), and avoid the Bad Stuff (tedium, indulgence & predictability). Our rule: a song must have 3 things. You got 3 things you got a song.

Back in the day when MTV actually offered its viewers the occasional cool musical experience, Thomas and his pale pals performed on a 1997 episode of Alternative Nation and it was mindblowingly good.