When it comes to this year’s Soundwaves Festival, even special guest former Pere Ubu frontman David Thomas doesn’t know what to expect – least of all in his own set.

“Claudia [Molitor, festival director] emailed me and asked if I wanted to do the festival,” he admits from his home in Hove.

“I will sort out what I’m doing about 12 hours before. If I planned out something today by the time I got to the afternoon it would not be the same as it started out. When I got to the moment it would change anyway.”

Thomas is part of the Saturday night programme at Brighton TownHall entitled Sing!, which sees the venue turned over to investigate “The Infinite Possibilities Of Voice”.

The town hall atrium will host Thomas, Sound Intermedia performing with chamber ensemble Chroma, and Brighton’s Gazelle Twin premiering a specially developed work exploring dialogue between humans and machines.

The council chamber will be home to “sound alchemist” Mikhail Karikis, while the police cells under the hall will house installations and performances by Amy Cunningham and Claudia Kappenberg.

Thomas – with his idiosyncratic vocal style and a career spanning more than 30 years on the cutting edge – was a natural choice for the festival thread, despite his suspicions about the over-conceptualising of his art.

“I’ve been a professional recording artist singer-musician since 1975, and I’m just the kind of guy who delivers the goods,” he says.

“People know I do a wide variety of things, they can be highly conceptual at times, highly emotional, highly experimental or highly commercial at other times.”

His career began with Pere Ubu’s 1978 debut The Modern Dance, which is now hailed as a modern classic coming just after the back-to-basics punk revolution.

Thomas led an experimental garage band happy to break up the music with bursts of analogue synthesisers, usher in songs with industrial horns and litter recorded performances with deliberate feedback.

At the centre of it all was Thomas’s unique vocalisations, going from conversational mumbling to throaty growls to intense screaming to double-tracked creepiness, backed up live by twitchy performances.

A former journalist, Thomas has written extensively about the role of the vocalist in popular music as a focal point.

“That focal point was established when the band looks out to the audience and the audience focuses into the music through the singer,” he says.

“The singer operates through the centre, his role is that of the narrator.

“Everything I have done has been to do with stories of moments. Everything from my early music to the mini-operas and more theatrical pieces has always been about stories that you see along the road – the James Cain or Kerouacian scenes of life and empty places.”

More recently Thomas has been investigating how he records the music he makes, both with the reformed Pere Ubu and his other projects Rocket From The Tombs and with Two Pale Boys, using homemade junk-o-phones instead of microphones to create a hyper-naturalistic method of recording.

As he puts it, “I don’t like torturing sound – I don’t like using EQ.

“I’m tone deaf and synesthetic, so I don’t hear the way people normally do – I perceive sound in terms of geometry. When I use the junk-ophones they emphasise the perspective and geometry.”

For the latest Pere Ubu album the band is laying bare the creative process to its fans, sporadically releasing batches of band demos as the album comes together.

“All the Pere Ubu albums have become massive projects that take years,” he says.

“The last one was a theatrical thing that took forever. I thought it would be interesting to show how you write songs, and how they come together.

“I like the notion of transparency in how a band works. In the early 1990s we used to publish these interactive discs, CD-ROMS, with all the accounts of what the albumcost.

“We used to publish band meeting notes – although every time we had a band meeting somebody would get fired.

“The band has been very stable these past 17 years because we stopped having meetings. Talking is what causes problems...”

* Sing! 5.45pm to 10.30pm, tickets £10, festival pass £25. Visit arts.brighton.ac.uk/soundwaves