Anyone that grew up in the mid-west, outside of Chicago at least, has imagined what life could be like if only they lived somewhere else. David Thomas obviously imagined such things, as he currently resides in France, which recalls the mass exodus of black jazzbos to Europe in the ‘40s. But the music that Pere Ubu creates is uniquely mid-western. And even more specifically, it’s an aural representation of the inner-city of Cleveland.

While Cleveland often enough gets a bad rap, there are now innumerable opportunities for unique avenues of expressions. Not so thirty years ago. When Pere Ubu began, they presaged post-punk, which seems ridiculous considering that in 1975 the tag punk didn’t really resonate yet. Even beyond that, the relative isolation of original music in Cleveland seems to have given rise to something that couldn’t necessarily have been attained in NYC.

The etymology of “dub housing” is in reference to the rote construction of similar dwellings that sprung up during these musicians’ lives in and around Cleveland (not an homage to Jamaican music, but that’s important as well). In examining the lyrical purpose of this, on the title track Thomas seems to equate the lifestyles that are contained inside these houses with complacency saying “that talk echoes around and around.”

But musically, the Ubus can conjure the sights of Cleveland – they don’t need Thomas warbling above the din to achieve that. In a kind of post-modern frenzy, on “Thriller,” the band creates dissonant sounds, allying members with non-representational artists, film makers and theater folks to create a certain representation of what reality sounds or looks like in their minds.

Listening to “Thriller” thirty years after its recording, the noises created specifically for this track can easily be the ethereal sounds of Cleveland if one’s bold enough to walk down Euclid Ave. at three in the morning. It’s intercepted radio waves, street kids breaking into abandoned homes and destroying what’s left of them. It’s the darkness that every mid-westerner feels and the hopelessness that settles upon figuring that escape is all but impossible.

Fan-boys and critics can use either Beefheart or Zappa in helping to define punk - a futile endeavor. But as punk exists now, in a mainstream sense at least, it really has no ties to Pere Ubu. But even before Ubu came together, Rocket from the Tombs helped define what punk would be during the ‘70s. One of the key members of RFTT, as well as the Ubus prior to Modern Dance, was Peter Laughner.

But whatever punk is, or what it turned into - one thing really remains constant. The one common element that most can agree on is the fact that punk, in whatever form, is supposed to be deviant. It’s supposed to refuse reliance on past, standard ideas and be used as an avenue of expression.

Punk has been able to achieve a great deal, but one convention that it never was able to defy was instrumentation. More often than not, punk bands are set up like rock bands. There are obvious, exceptions. The Screamers, an L.A. band allied with the Masque, are instantly recognizable for eschewing the standard band set-up to replace guitars with keyboards. And while Pere Ubu never quite reached that point, the inclusion of Ravenstine’s synthesizer moved the band away from most, presupposed notion of what a punk or rock band does.