Saturday 30 January 2016, 8pm
“Ceaselessly inventive” – The Sunday Times
“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.” – Time Out
“Grown men cried” – The Financial Times
David Thomas and two pale boys make their long anticipated return to London for a one-off gig at OTO. David Thomas and two pale boys is avant-garde traditional folk music from the future performed with post-dance technology.
David Thomas and two pale boys 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 (Pere Ubu, 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. Soundman and ambient synthesist Gagarin often performs as a pale boy and will be joining the band for this event.
