pere-ubu

Pere Ubu post update regarding their current tour lineup

Pere Ubu

Art punk legends Pere Ubu have a new album out and a North American tour on the way, which hits NYC on September 12 at Bowery Ballroom. That tour faced a roadblock when the band’s non-US citizen members were not allowed into the country, but now the band have published a note on their website, titled “We Fought the Faceless Government Clerk and the Faceless Government Clerk Lost,” which sort of presents a solution to the problem:

Pere Ubu has added Cleveland guitar maestro Dave Cintron to the lineup for its September tour of the eastern USA and Canada. Mr. Cintron substitutes for British guitarist Keith Moliné, who is unable to enter the US due to the visa approval process delays, ongoing since May. The group’s second synthesizer, Gagarin, is also unable to join the band on tour, but plans are in progress to produce a remote performance live from their homes in London, by way of a complex cell/broadband system.

Band leader David Thomas says that the show will be different to the UK and Europe tours but it will still be Pere Ubu and the audience will be witness to the morph that is part of this band’s unique history. “Mr. Cintron brings a unique perspective to the songs and we will subsume that into the collective. Pere Ubu is The Borg.”

The improvisational nature of both the band’s composition process and its performances means that all the songs in the set will have to be rewritten and relearned, particularly those from new album Lady From Shanghai (Fire Records).

“We will do what others call impossible,” Thomas says. “The songs from the new album are anti-logical, played in nonsensical structures and with inscrutable tunings. None of it can be written out or translated. We will devise new patterns of anti-logic.

“The remote performance will only be for one song but it’s a victory nonetheless,” Thomas said. “For a month I’ve been in my studio working on this project. Everyone says it can’t be done… Oh well.”

If you’d like to see how that all goes down, you can still get tickets to Pere Ubu and Gagarin’s Bowery Ballroom show.

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