David Thomas and two pale boys return to Cafe OTO to perform a live underscore to the 1962 cult classic film 'Carnival Of Souls'. This "world premiere" work-in-progress is by way of a scouting expedition for the Pere Ubu Film Group which has previously toured in the USA and UK with the 3D version of 'It Came From Outer Space' and 'X, The Man With X-Ray Eyes.'
"I grew up addicted to Friday Night sci fi flicks," Pere Ubu's David Thomas said. "The genre had an incalculable effect on the third generation of Young Rock Giants who emerged in the 70s. Now it's time to honor that debt.
"The amateurish enthusiasm and naive intention, as well as lack of budget, of the B-movie encourages a kind of communal abstraction that approaches folk culture, and the frequent lack of a coherent agenda leaves lots of wiggle room for whatever personalized context or agenda an audience or band chooses to overlay. Wiggle room is good."
Time Out described David Thomas and two pale boys as, "A gloriously garrulous, diffidently divine, pumping, wheezy, melodeon-driven, contemporised avant-folk... Twisted and inspired, it is like everything and nothing you've ever heard, [they] are now creating a whole new kind of strange and affecting beauty."
Glenn Max, musical director at the Royal Festival Hall, noted of the Film Group's previous underscores, "(They) have raised the standard for live soundtracks."
David Thomas and two pale boys is avant-garde traditional folk music from the future performed with post-dance technology.
They generate strange and beautiful new shapes, rolling stories, and sonic panoramas out of spontaneous deconstructions created with brass, guitar and electronics. The simple seesawing of a melodeon gives way to cascading electronica and expressionistic soundscapes - sometimes pulsating and abrasive, sometimes mysterious and exploratory. Through it all is woven the mordant wit of one of the most distinctive and charismatic singers in modern music, David Thomas.
David Thomas is the founder of the legendary Pere Ubu, an avant-rock group that's exerted a huge influence on the way countless bands have approached music since 1975. Formed in 1994, the two pale boys is one of a series of projects that redefine the partnership of voice and instrument in pursuit of a vehicle robust, spontaneous, and parochial enough to speak with the true voice of the human experience. It is urban folk music purged of urbanity, and rooted in the geography of sound.
Founding member of the pale boys, Keith Moliné (They Came From The Stars I Saw Them, Infidel) manipulates multiple voices, dynamic calamities, delicate whispers, and angular rhythms via a midi-guitar setup. Andy Diagram (Diagram Brothers, James, The Honkies, The Spaceheads plays trumpet through radio receivers, echo machines & delays, layering sound-on-sound cascades of electronica. He joined the pale boys in 1996. He replaced violinist Chris Brierley who played with the pale boys in 1994-95.
David Thomas and two pale boys re-wrote the musical score and featured in the London West End production of the "junk opera" Shockheaded Peter for a 3 month run at the Albery Theatre, St Martins Lane from April 4 to June 16, 2002. They featured in Hal Willner's production of "Perfect Partners: Nino Rota & Federico Fellini," April 24 2004, at the Barbican in London, performing the soundtrack to "Satyricon." "A terrifying, raw-noise deconstructivist interpretation," according to The Guardian (4/27/04).
