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Pere Ubu are an experimental rock music group formed in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1975. They have broken up and reformed several times, and despite many long-term band members, singer David Thomas is the only constant. Pere Ubu's official website reports that the group is named "after the protagonist of Ubu Roi, a play by Frenchman Alfred Jarry." [1]While Pere Ubu have never been widely popular--usually categorized as " underground rock"--they have a devoted following, have been hugely influential on several generations of forward-thinking musicians and are among the most critically acclaimed American musical groups.
Critical opinions of Pere Ubu include "the world's only expressionist Rock `n` Roll band." [2] and "Pere Ubu will be looked back on as the most important group to have come out of America in the last decade and a half. Either that or they will be entirely forgotten." [3]
Pere Ubu have consistently conducted their affairs as they see fit, regardless of convention: They refuse to discuss or explain their sometimes odd music, forgoing the usual banter of newspaper and press interviews. Pere Ubu have compiled a list of protocols for touring, live performances and the like, including such statements as, "Lighting should be theatrical rather than rockist. We are interested in atmosphere, moodA person's mood is a sustained affective state, consisting of a combination of emotions. In normal functioning, moods are largely adaptive to external events. A mood disorder (such as clinical depression) is a pronounced maladaptive mood. Similarly, seaso, dramaThis article refers to the art form. For the town, see Drama, Greece . Drama is a term generally used to refer to an art form involving performances by actors, either real or computer-generated. These performances can be in a variety of media: live perfor, energy, subtlety, imaginationImagination is, in general, the power or process of producing mental images and ideas. The term is technically used in psychology for the process of reviving in the mind percepts of objects formerly given in sense perception. Since this use of the term co-- not rock cliche." [4]
(Tired of being asked to define their music, Pere Ubu coined the term Avant Garage to reflect interest in both experimental avant gardeMarcel Duchamp's Fountain Avant garde (sometimes avant-garde is a French phrase, one of many French phrases used by English speakers. It is often used to refer to people or actions that are novel or experimental, particularly with respect to the arts and music (especially Musique concrèteMusique Concrete is the name given to a class of electronic music produced from editing together fragments of natural and industrial sounds. Concrete (as opposed to "Abstraite", traditional composition) was pioneered in the late 1940s and 1950s, spurred b) and raw, direct bluesBlues is a vocal and instrumental musical form which evolved from African American spirituals, shouts, work songs and chants and has its earliest stylistic roots in West Africa. Blues has been a major influence on later American and Western popular music, influenced garage rockGarage rock was a simple, raw form of rock and roll created by a number of American bands in the mid- 1960s. Inspired by British Invasion bands like The Beatles, The Kinks, and The Rolling Stones, these mostly midwestern American groups played a variation. Thomas has stated "Avant Garage" is "a jokeA joke is a short story or short series of words spoken or communicated with the intent of being laughed at or found humorous by the listener or reader. This sort of "joke" is not the same as a practical joke. Laughter, the intended human reaction to joke invented to have something to give journalists when they yelp for a neat sound bite or pigeonhole." [5])
