Sonic Youth legend Thurston Moore is shortly to arrive in Dublin to deliver the premiere performance of Guitar Explorations of Cloud Formations, a brilliantly adventurous suite of music that the guitar maestro will be playing alongside three other musicians. Taking place at the National Concert Hall, the performance is informed by Moore’s fascination with sky-scapes across the UK and Ireland.

“I have a real romantic intrigue with Irish clouds!” chuckles the characteristically affable Moore, speaking from Connecticut. “I actually did a tour there with an Irish-American musician named John Moloney, who’s more well known for his work with a band named Sun Burned Hand Of The Man. He’s an old close mate of mine, and we booked a duo tour all through Ireland, about 10 years ago. It was in February – and February in Ireland is not exactly prime time for anyone to tour! But we took it upon ourselves to do such a thing.

“We played in all these different rural pubs, and at first, we were just playing improvised noise music, much to the polarisation of the pub dwellers (laughs). They were sort of flattened against the back bar, going, ‘What the fuck is he doing?!’ One of those people was Roy Harper, who was actually really intrigued by it. The next day, he took us to his studio where was working. We spent the day with him, listening to his music, which was quite nice.

“After the second or third gig, we realised, maybe we should incorporate some actual, quote-unquote ‘songs’ in the set! We started playing songs from my first solo record, Psychic Hearts, which are pretty easy to learn. That got a much more positive response, so by the end of the tour – I think by the time we reached Belfast – we were playing a full song set (laughs). It was a much safer bet!”

Moore’s fascination with experimental and avant garde music can perhaps be read as the flip side to Sonic Youth, who emerged out of the ’80s New York no wave scene, before attaining iconic status thanks to classic albums like Daydream Nation, Dirty and Goo.

“Possibly,” Thurston considers. “In some ways, it’s less democratic. Like most bands starting at a young age, with Sonic Youth, it was all for one and one for all. You’re all willing to starve together, and get in a van, and just by the mercy of god, go and do it. Regardless of whether you were a boogie band, or an experimental noise band, you just set sail and decided if this was something you wanted to do for the rest of your life.

“Everybody in Sonic Youth realised, ‘This is what we do’, whether there’s revenue or not. It’s not for everybody. Bands don’t have much of a shelf-life – they have to find a bit more of a responsible measure in their lives, or they become domesticated, and it’s a tough haul if you’re going to do it. For me, by the time Sonic Youth stopped performing, and then going and creating bands under my own name, I felt the only difference was that, all of sudden, my name was on the marquee.”

Thurston further considers the difference in approach of his more recent projects.

“I was pretty much making the ultimate decisions, whereas that wasn’t the case in Sonic Youth – I wasn’t the boss in Sonic Youth,” he continues. “I was possibly the most headstrong bringing in new material etc. Other than that, I felt like for the most part, the band was founded through my instigation. But that early on, it really becomes a group effort from day one.

“It’s not like that anymore – it’s me calling the shots and organising everything, which is fine. I don’t really have it in me to want to replicate the previous experience. In fact, you can’t. It’s an experience that only really happens when you’re young, and then you move forward.

“I feel like the music I make is hardly any different to the music I would make with Steve, Kim and Lee. It’s just with different people, and I’m telling these people what I like and what I don’t like. I would never have said that in Sonic Youth – they created their parts whether I liked them or not!”

So what can we expect from the Dublin concert?

“I composed a series of pieces and it is like a suite of sorts,” explains Moore. “The idea was presented to me through my wife Eva. When the offer came in, she conceived of this idea to do a suite for cloud formations. She’s very interested in that politically, through looking at how important it is to consider what’s going on in the culture of climate change.

“It was thinking about the study and the beauty of cloud formations, because they are such very distinct formations, which you would never really think unless you studiously looked at the literature of clouds. You’d go, ‘Well, that’s a cumulus, and that’s a nebulous’, and so on. I never looked in the sky and defined or detailed what cloud formations are.

“Taking nature for granted is certainly okay, but to actually take a look into the studies of it, it’s completely and utterly fascinating. So I thought it was a good idea to think about what clouds represent, as far as being a life force right now in the world. So Eva is preparing a visual aspect to it, where there’s going to be films playing that’s she’s constructed.”

Thurston outlines his creative approach in composing the music.

“I would look at these different formations pictorially, and they would inform me intellectually about what I wanted to do with the music,” he notes. “But at the same time, I was pretty much composing as I would at any time. I’m playing the guitar, and I’m composing new pieces, specifically for this group to play at this festival. And the libretto of it being pieces for cloud formations, just gives it a patina of some kind of intention.

“It’s just literature in the music. Like, you choose a certain album title and it opens up the record. I think if Pete Townshend called Who’s Next anything else, you would have approached that album with a very different state of consciousness. Or even Sticky Fingers, or Nevermind The Bollocks. If Nevermind The Bollocks was just simply called Anarchy or God Save The Queen, you would approach it with a different aesthetic.

“Calling it Nevermind The Bollocks gives a whole other weight to that record. Whether it’s songs or albums, I’ve always considered titles to be very elemental – it’s as essential as the music itself.”

• Thurston Moore performs Guitar Explorations of Cloud Formations at the National Concert Hall, Dublin on April 5. More info and tickets are available here.