If anyone is capable of elevating rock music into the realm of fine art, it's John Cale. With more than 20 solo albums spanning a 30-year recording career, not to mention co-founding the Velvet Undergound and his collaborations with Lou Reed and Brian Eno, numerous film soundtracks and chamber works, Cale continues to create memorable musical moments.

Cale's 2005 release blackAcetate is no exception. He abandoned the electronics and keyboards that were central to 2003's Hobosapiens, and took to the Gibson Flying V electric guitar and Marshall Amp as primary compositional tools. John Cale and Band's current blackAcetate tour is reportedly one of the harder-edged live shows that he's delivered in years.

And Prague is more than just another tour stop for Cale. "In Prague there has always been a special audience," he says. "I think it goes back to the VU, and the role the VU had there."

The VU Cale refers to is the Velvet Underground, the seminal rock group that had a huge influence in the Czech Republic, most notably on bands like the Plastic People of the Universe. But Cale's musical pioneering began before the Velvets, and has never been limited to rock 'n' roll. He's worked with two of the four most prominent minimalists — LaMonte Young and Terry Riley. And it was two classical composers, Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein, who secured Cale a scholarship to the prestigious Tanglewood Music Center in Massachusetts. That was the young Welshman's first exposure to America, and it was there that he studied composition with Iannis Xenakis.

The son of a coal miner, Cale never did buy the standard conservatory theories; his appreciation for music was on a different level. "I just listened to [Xenakis'] Metastasis and thought, that's really a beautiful piece of orchestration by a unique ear, a unique musician," he says. "Xenakis is somebody I've always admired because he had such an intense, penetrating ear for the orchestra. Those two orchestral pieces he did — Metastasis and Pithoprakta — they came out as really intensely personal bits of Greek music."

Personal and intense are qualities that tend to emerge in all of Cale's work as well. He's shown that intensity as a producer, with a spectrum of artists ranging from punk acts like the Stooges and Siouxsie and the Banshees to more folk-oriented artists like Alan Stivell and Nico. Cale's solo rock CDs are also solidly of their times. Whether on 1974's fear, 1981's Honi Soit or blackAcetate, Cale rides the currents of the pop and rock present while artfully navigating the rapids of the approaching future.

By the time Cale and Band arrive in Prague, they will have thoroughly road-tested their new rock 'n' roll material. Rumor has it that he's even pulling out the viola from time to time to further propel a few ancient Velvet Underground songs.