It all started as a rather odd email encounter when cultural critic Greil Marcus sent me an essay by Pere Pere Ubu's frontman David Thomas.

At the time I was editing an art magazine. Thomas' immense, rambling but thoroughly fascinating essay had me enthralled, but it sure didn't fit an art magazine. Indeed, I'm not sure where it would or will fit, ever. In esssence, Thomas' essay, sitting as of writing at around 10,000 words but growing every day, is about place and how that sense of place effects his - and all - creative output.

"Isolation preserves. Isolation clarifies," he writes. "I travel to confirm something I already know, that the sound of musical activity is as much about space and perspective - a geography of sound - as it is about the physics of vibration, or the aesthetics of melody, harmony and rhythm."

We discussed the piece via e-mail, or at least I attempted to discuss it and he grunted, if that's possible via electronic mail. It didn't take long to figure that David Thomas, even over the souless medium of electronic mail, was one seriously eccentric character. But hey, Pere Ubu remain one of the most influential and seriously 'alternative' bands in rock'n'roll history.

"Culture as understood 100, even 50, years ago no longer exists," says Thomas. "The only reason Mozart wrote music was to sell Calvin Klein perfume. Voltaire only wrote to sell Gauloises cigarettes. We live in a punk world. Malcolm McLaren said he invented punk music to sell clothes. Everyone laughed at his wit . . . those ironic Englishmen.

"We recognized the horror and truth behind it.

"Punk represented the victory of fashion over substance, of appearance over meaning, of attitude over content," he says. "It was the tool by which culture was finally done away with, rock music's evolution into literature shortcircuited. Businessmen loved it. It was the victory of Madison Avenue just at the point that rock music was preparing to deliver William Faulkner, Henry James and Herman Melville. Punk and the Sony Corporation rode to the rescue."

Thomas, of course, speaks from decades of relative obscurity and a position of remarkable influence. The band, formed in 1975 in Cleveland, Ohio, took the jarring discord of punk and gave it a new and poetic form. Thomas's lyrics, often chilling, but always tongue-in-cheek, had a surreal edge. The band's early albums, The Modern Dance (1978), Dub Housing (1979) and Datapanik in the Year Zero (1977) became instant classics in any self-respecting avantgardist's record collection while their first single, 30 Seconds Over Tokyo, preempted many of the nihilistic themes of punk rock.

Their 1980s and early 1990s work was mixed, but their eleventh album, Pennsylvania (1998), suggests a new lease of life.

Pennsylvania's lyrics traverse a strange blend of nostalgia and manifesto-like rants against culture, inspiring Greil Marcus to write in the New York Times: "Pere Ubu may be a better band today than it has ever been; funnier, more doom struck and more passionate. Mr Thomas's voice is that of a man muttering in a crowd. You think he's talking to himself until you realize he's talking to you."

At times he has sounded like the guy you try to avoid in the crowd. Thomas is known for his substantial girth and manic stage performances and at times his lyrics have veered into crazed rants; in the 1979 song, Lost in Art, he cries out in a panicked tone "Gimme, gimme, gimme. I want my shoes" over and over until you're sure what he needs is a straitjacket. But Thomas' more extreme moments seem calmed, at least in execution, on the latest record. Pennsylvania is a journey through a remembered landscape speckled with outraged, manifesto-like statements:

"Liars own the words and all the pictures in all the museums in the world are just shell and pea game played by the clever people to bilk the rubes.

"Reality is defined by the needs of the media . . . Culture is a weapon that's used against us . . . culture is a swampland of superstition, ignorance and abuse."

And David Thomas isn't joking. In what may be one of the last true punk statements, Thomas happily dismisses almost all forms of culture in a simple broadside. "Visual art only exists to be decorative," he says. "Nobody with serious ambitions can use the form. The day is past."

However rock music almost passes muster. On the Pere Ubu Web site Thomas writes: "Rock music as an art is designed to communicate that which is beyond words. It's visionary, nonlinear, nonverbal, non-narrative, inarticulate. We're dedicated to the art of cohesive, intelligent, nonverbal communication."

Yet lyrics are an integral element of Pere Ubu's work, most especially on Pennsylvania. "I rarely write lyrics in a linear way," says Thomas.

"There is a synthesis of vision and sound. The object is to shape sensation. Human consciousness, it seems to me, may exist as a form of complex, hieroglyphic sensation from which we pull the words that we need. Everything that I know seems to be encoded as sensation. I wouldn't know a thought if it came up and bit me. When you ask a question the answer springs out of nothingness and I flap my gums. If I like the sound of what my voice speaks then I learn it by rote so that I can roll it out like a monkey the next time. The form of the words triggers a recognition of meaning."

However compared to earlier Pere Ubu, the lyrics on Pennsylvania have more of a narrative quality. "I had a very specific setting in which I wanted the sensations of the art to be presented," says Thomas. "This required that I use a more narrative approach . . . I also used [it] for the specific reason that I always say that I don't use a narrative approach."

Ironically, for a man who disputes the value of words in linear form, Thomas started out as a rock journalist. "There was an entirely different school of thought 20 or 30 years ago," he says.