Goodiepal

Goodiepal

Goodiepal or Gæoudjiparl van den Dobbelsteen, whose real name is Parl Kristian Bjørn Vester, is a controversial Danish/Faroese musician/composer. The eccentric and self-made Goodiepal has influenced the course of modern music through radical excursions into computer technology and media art. He performs and lectures about his work and ideas worldwide and has until recently been employed as a teacher at DIEM (Danish Institute for Electro-acoustic Music) at the Royal Academy of Music in Aarhus, Denmark. Goodiepal declared intellectual war against the stupidity in modern computer music and media art, which is to say against The Royal Academy of Music, when he quit the job in 2008. As per 2009 he lives in London.

Career

1988-1992: The computer demo scene and a young hacker

Goodiepal spent his childhood painting Citadel Miniatures and playing video games and role playing games before going to a Rudolf Steiner school where gadgets such as computers, calculators, walkmen, and Game&Watch games were prohibited. This led to Goodiepal’s participation in secret demo groups releasing demos on floppy discs for Commodore and Amiga computers. Only very few of these demos have survived to this day but some can still be found as downloads from various peer-to-peer services. Goodiepal departed from the Steiner school after eight years and embarked on various activities with hacker groups in the grey area of computer software programming and distribution in order to provide for his musical career, by then already in full progress.

File:Interelektrolux.jpg

Interelektrolux with Kim Grønborg, 1993

1992-1995: Vip.ibex

The first full-length CD Vip. ibex was released by the Danish record label Spoof Records in 1995 under the name Circulation of Events. Only a limited number of copies were distributed and the rest were deliberately hidden away in a basement in North Jutland, Denmark, where they were kept in order to be rereleased ten years later on the date of pressing. Circulation of Events was a name used by Goodiepal but sometimes also by early mentors such as Odd Bjertnes and Halfdan Larsen. In 1993 Kim Grønborg and Goodiepal premiered the light concert Interelektrolux at Galleri Høegsberg in Århus, Denmark. The show consisted of two rooms with individually computer programmed light sources creating a one hour long concert running continuously for two weeks.

1996-1998: Sincerely Christmas and Friends of The Goodiepal

1996 saw Goodiepal produce the debut album Knee for infamous Danish (then teenage) rockband Düreforsög. The album consolidated the band's great talent and led to a performance as the opening act on the main Orange Stage at 1997's Roskilde Festival in Denmark. The notoriously shy Goodiepal operated the sound system from inside a five meter tall inflatable rubber chicken placed on top of the stage, an act rumoured to be a tribute to the legendary American band Cock E.S.P..
In the following years, Goodiepal worked as a producer and programmer for a number of Danish artists and also released the CD Sincerely Christmas on major label BMG Europe/RCA with Danish techno equilibrist Bjørn Svin.
In 1998, Goodiepal hosted two extravagant shows called Friends of The Goodiepal at Den Anden Opera in Copenhagen, Denmark, presenting V/Vm, Anthony Manning, Thomas Brinkmann, Escaping From the Zoo and many other friends.

Goodiebag/ Demonbag codebreaker, 1997

Brand-archive codebreaker, 2000

1997-2000: Goodiebags and Demonbags

Goodiepal's connection to V/Vm Test Records was established when the Manchester-based label released the two legendary 7"-series Goodiebags and Demonbags consisting of nine+nine singles. Programmers and sound artists such as Anthony Manning, Lucky Kitchen, V/Vm, Steuea, Per Hoier, Voks and Team Doyobi were featured on the 18 vinyls, which came with a secret Codebreaker manual sheet.
The series were concluded in 2000 and Goodiepal immediately carried on with the new Mainpal Inv. Brand-archive consisting of a series of autonomously manipulated sound designs for a range of companies such as Sony, Nokia, Chupa Chups and Bang&Olufsen. Goodiepal is said to have been working for the Danish advertisement agency Danesadwork/Propaganda at the time as a creative consultant, fuelling rumours that the Brand-archive reclaimed material he had produced for these companies. Subsequent lawsuits supposedly had him kicked out of the business and despite the hype no one dared to employ the Goodiepal afterwards, so he started working as a home carer on the Faroe Islands as well as in Frederiksberg, Denmark.
In between numerous releases, Goodiepal toured extensively all over the western world and in 2000 relocated to London becoming closely connected to the Italian duo Gamers In Exile and their record label Unbearable Recordings. Goodiepal/Mainpal appeared with some of the tracks from the Goodiebag/Demonbag-series on Unbearable_Heroes Wave 2.

2001-2003: Narc Beacon

In 2001 the French label SKI-PP, run by DAT Politics, released Goodiepal's debut album Narc Beacon on CD, it was subsequently released on vinyl as well called Nag Nag Bacon. The album was praised in several magazines as one of that year's best releases, and also listed among the most important 50 Danish records ever in the Encyclopedia of Danish Rock Music ([[Dansk Rock Leksikon). British music magazine The Wire wrote, "On the first few spins, the disc feels like a sonic translation of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. It's an immersive, disorientating trip that marries Sgt Pepper-esque chunks of psychedelic digitalia, jaunty folk jigs, children's TV jingles, baroque music box follies and indescribable sonic oddities."
Right before the release of Narc Beacon, Goodiepal proclaimed that he would take a break from releasing music and that his next major work would be a brick based compositional musical language. This would take the form of a game, which would deal more radically with computer music and later develop into the Mort Aux Vaches Ekstra Extra compositional game scenario. Originally intended to be premiered around 2003, the game was not brought into action until 2007 when it was premiered at the gallery Andersen's Contemporary in Copenhagen, Denmark. Goodiepal toured most of the western world again with a set consisting of sound bites from the album, whistling, and clips from the Brand-archive. His live concerts during this period were highly praised with one notable concert, recorded by national Danish radio, receiving six out of six stars in the Danish newspaper Ekstrabladet.
Narc Beacon was awarded an honourable mention at the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria, in 2002, and the same year Goodiepal gave his first lectures in the US, among other places at CalArts, Brown University, and University of Iowa. He also lectured with a broken leg and damaged arms at Princeton University, US, after throwing himself out from a balcony in East London, UK.
Goodiepal’s childhood friend Emil Tin and his brother Max Grønlund formed a company in the mid-nineties called Koblo responsible for the legendary software synthesizers Vibra 9000, Stella 9000 and Gamma 9000. By the end of 2002 the company went bankrupt and while the stock was seized by shareholders Koblo, having sacked all employees working in the backend supplying authorisation codes, nevertheless kept selling their software synthesizers from their online website. Goodiepal hacked the website and started running autonomous support free of charge to all the users who were stuck in the loop..

Goodiepal lecturing at Princeton University, 2003

2004-2005: The mechanical bird and Mort Aux Vaches Ekstra

In 2004 Goodiepal premiered his self-built mechanical bird, which became a popular feature at numerous live events around Europe together with a set of planets and a wind-up music machine, the latter using punch cards of Goodiepal's own fabrication. Numerous mobile phone images and film clips can be found online from these shows and rumour has it that Goodiepal spent most of 2004 with his family on the Faroe Islands building these instruments and show gadgets. He further commissioned Anthony Manning and Pure to record special wake-up calls for the mechanical bird.
2004 also saw Goodiepal sell a huge library and sound archive called the Hacker Pack in an attempt to devalue recorded media. The content of the Hacker Pack was mainly what he described as “reclaimed sounds”, in other words sounds that he had made for various jingles and advertisements a few years earlier. Due to the shady copyrights of the material, Goodiepal shipped most of the discs, which also included various software and data on conspiracy theories and UFO activities, from his home on the Faroe Islands.
He went on to participate in the installation Circus Pentium by Danish artist Henrik Plenge Jakobsen opening at Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, Denmark, also in 2004. The work comprised a circus set-up with Goodiepal playing the lute alongside other actors and was also shown at Art Basel, Switzerland, and Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Holland. The spectacular installation generally got a negative response from art critics in Denmark while it was received to greater acclaim outside Scandinavia. The same year saw Goodiepal employed as a teacher in History and Aesthetics of Electronic Music at DIEM (Danish Institute of Electro-acoustic Music) The Royal Danish Academy of Music in Aarhus, Denmark, subsequently moving on to teach in Composition as well.
In 2005 Goodiepal released an untitled double-12" coloured vinyl on V/Vm Test Records with the catalogue number VVMT24 containing a selection of iconic Goodiepal music such as the home-built music box, whistling, action packed trance plus not least the famous mechanical bird, including one of the wake-up calls as mentioned above. The release came in 100 copies with engravings in Goodiepal's significant style, which has also been a greatly admired feature on a number of other of his releases. Despite quickly selling out, the album was widely considered a failure not reaching the high level of Narc Beacon, something Goodiepal dismissed as he regards it as one of his most interesting, dealing with the concepts of mechanics and presets. The release, as well as many other Goodiepal releases, is available for free download from V/Vm's Brainwashed website [35]. 2005 also saw the release of the live-album Mort Aux Vaches on the Dutch record label Staalplaat with relative international media attention to follow.
In continuation of his dealings with the unsuccessful synthesizer manufacturer Key2Sound, working without any payment, Goodiepal decided to take action by hiding an unnamed piece of music in the system source code of a prototype called INetSynth. The prototype and source code were then brought up for auction offering the head of Key2Sound a veto-price of 10 Danish kroner, if he wanted his prototype back. Through this act, Goodiepal reclaimed a symbolic fee for the work he had done for Key2sound, and since they did not respond, the INetSynth, with tag, went to an unknown Dutch collector.
In 2005, Goodiepal was commissioned by the Nordic Council of Ministers to create a sound piece representing Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Iceland, and Greenland at the World Expo 2005 in Aichi, Japan. The result was a generative computer music program playing Goodiepal music through countless speakers in three exhibition spaces in the exhibition's Nordic pavilion.

The Blue House, London

2007-2008: The autonomous London school

In 2007, Goodiepal opened an autonomous school on the first floor of The Blue House in London, designed by FAT Architecture, for people interested in Radical Computer Music and other of his arts. The school, open from 9am to 10:10am every weekday, is free of charge and financed through his skillful work as a fixer of fine mechanics.
The term Radical Computer Music was coined by Goodiepal in relation to the Mort Aux Vaches Ekstra Extra compositional game scenario. It promotes an expanded dialogue between human beings and artificial and alternative intelligences as a way to transgress a condition of stagnation, according to Goodiepal prevailing in contemporary computer music and media art. The game scenario is an exercise in the creation of musical scores to challenge the mindset of “other” intelligences, considering issues such as utopia, time, notation techniques, language, levels of unscannability, and the role of the composer.
In late 2007 Goodiepal made a famous appearance on the Danish late night talk show Den 11. Time (The 11th Hour), lecturing about his musical theories and the future of artificial intelligence. He was initially given a time slot of about 25 minutes, but exceeded that by far lecturing for over an hour. So the lecture was edited down to 15 minutes of hight lights, to fit the program format, and made available in full length online.[36]
Mort Aux Vaches Ekstra Extra was launched as an educational program at a special lecture given in April 2008 at the 5th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art, the work as such was first premiered in October 2007 at a solo exhibition at Andersen's Contemporary in Copenhagen, Denmark. At the opening, a collection of 45 individual bindings, holding nine musical objects for the Radical Computer Music game scenario, was brought up for sale. The boxes started at a low price, which went up significantly throughout the exhibition and a few remaining copies are supposedly still available from the Danish publisher Pork Salad Press. Throughout the exhibition, Goodiepal gave a number of lectures covering various fields in modern composition and computer music.
On the 27th of October 2008, Goodiepal received a first class merit certificate, with distinction, from StoryTellerScotland being the only known existing proof of his qualifications. He is now officially allowed to call himself a Master Storyteller of the highest accord in the UK.

2008-2009: Five steps in a Gentleman's War on the stupidity of modern computer music and media based art

When Goodiepal left The Royal Academy of Music in Aarhus, Denmark, in 2008, he did not go quietly. The declaration Five steps in a Gentleman's War on the stupidity of modern computer music and media based art was released as a supplement to the audio piece The Official Mort Aux Vaches Ekstra Extra Walkthrough [37] and the series of images called Snappidaggs [38] explaining the methodology behind Goodiepal's concept of Radical Computer Music. The following is a brief breakdown of Goodiepal's war declaration:

• Round one: The terrifying truth - Goodiepal set out to define his objectives against academia in general, and the Aarhus version in particular, at a special lecture given at The 5th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art. He also released the audio piece "Future Shock" [39] - sometimes called "Black Heart for Scandinavia" - on heart-shaped vinyl. As predicted, his actions were met by silence from the opponents in Aarhus.

• Round two: A possible solution for the future of computer music and media art in general - With reference to The Official Mort Aux Vaches Ekstra Extra Walkthrough [40] Goodiepal distributed his school books and solution to the crisis in computer music and media art, widely, using all means such as spamming, banner ads, and giving lectures across Europe. He was again met with silence, if not outright ridicule from his opponents.

• Round three: The great debate - Goodiepal carried on buying banner ads on selected internet sites as well as giving lectures. In December 2008 he bought four pages in the music magazine The Wire to prove his merits and capability of undertaking the work, he had set in motion. The opponents also carried on, laughing, including Professor John Deathridge, King's College in London, UK, who rejected Goodiepal's application for a Master degree on the basis of the autonomous and un-academical actions.

• Round four: Claim your victory and collect your danegæld - This round has yet to come...

• Round five: Heal the wounds and apply the new solution - And this round has yet to come...

By the end of 2008, Goodiepal declared himself nearly bankrupt having spent a significant but unspecified amount of money on his Gentleman's War.

Miscellaneous

Being a contemporary European music figure, a lot of people have drawn inspiration from Goodiepal and written him into their own story telling as a modern folk legend. Among these the most notable might be:

• Momus,”Goodiepal” from the album Jeomus (Cherry Red Records, 2008)
• Kevin Blechtum, “Get on Your Knees Boy” from the album Eat My Heart Out (Chicks on Speed, 2005)
• T.S. Høeg, "Nnooijjj, nu går det stærkt, men det skal nok gå alt sammen" from the piece for chamber ensemble 3 Betingelser for Liv (1999)
• T.S. Høeg, ”Når galskaben først er sluppet løs” from the collection of poems Albue (Copenhagen: Borgen, 2008)
• Negativland, ”You’re the sole reason we still take contemporary European music seriously”
• V/Vm, numerous tracks on the mp3-file V/Vm 365 (V/Vm Test Records, 2006)
• Ascoltare, "Gaeouija" [41]
• Mark von Schlegell, Mercury Station (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009)
• Viola Thiele, "1+1=3, Auf der Suche nach dem gemeinsamen Dritten in Kunst und (Pop-) Musik" (Institut für Kunst im Kontext, Universität der Kunste, Berlin, 2008)
• Rasmus Espenhain Nielsen, "Mort Aux Vaches Ekstra Extra: En Indledende Scanning" (Musikvidenskab, Institut for Kunst og Kulturvidenskab, Københavns Universitet, 2009)

Radical Computer Music

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Snappidagg07 - student work, 2008

File:Snappidagg09.jpg

Snappidagg09 - student work, 2008

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Snappidagg11 - student work, 2008

The term Radical Computer Music was initially coined by Goodiepal as a joke, while still teaching composition at The Royal Academy of Music in Denmark and refers to the habit in Scandinavia of addressing notated music as “serious music”. As such it not only refers to a different, more wide-ranging, approach to computer music, based on the acceptance of the medium as intelligent, but also includes media art as a field at risk of trivialisation and lack of utopian aspirations. According to Goodiepal, the scarcity of a utopian spark in contemporary computer music and media art is exacerbated by the low level of content in most computer based communication as a preference for sheer documentation appears to motivate most media activities. Generally, as Goodiepal has demonstrated in numerous of his lectures about Radical Computer Music, a call for easy access and convenience permeates the relation between humans and computers, rather than aspire for cultural evolution through technological refinement. In the process of this deflation, human language is reduced to machine-like commandos, when humans address machines without making use of their otherwise highly refined associative and context-based language. Goodiepal advocates that these communicative skills can be strengthened in humans through the creation of musical scores in languages challenging the mindsets of computers, artificial, and alternative intelligences. This way a mutual beneficial communication exercise can simultaneously take the man-machine relationship and computer music/ media art to the next level.

While it has been repeatedly predicated since the fifties that in 20 years time the computer will be more clever than human beings, the promise of the artificial intelligence remains yet to be fulfilled. With Radical Computer Music, Goodiepal proposes a game play where the point "beyond singularity" has been reached and artificial/alternative intelligences must be acknowledged as existing. He expands the notion of the "other" intelligence by including beings potentially alive in the electricity and water supply systems, as such beings not created by humans and therefore termed alternative intelligences, expanding the common belief that non-human intelligence can develop in complex networks of all kinds.

Goodiepal defines the primary limitation, to be challenged in current computer music, as the prevailing adherence to the form of the recorded stereo track, transmitted through two speakers and composed using computer software displaying time progression from left to right. This form has now become so much a cliché that one of Goodiepal’s main ambitions with the Mort Aux Vaches Ekstra Extra exercise is to force the participant to reject a progressive time line moving from A to B in favour of a compositional artifice where time does not progress. This strategy is in effect an exclusion of the notion of time altogether, and the game scenario emphasises this condition by placing the participant in a centre position between at least three musical objects all heavily loaded with information. These pull away from the centre leaving the participant in a vacuum position, from where his/her composition must unfold outside time and space. The participant’s unique ability to sense this exceptional vacuum event, and transform the experience into a composition communicated through a musical score, is a manifestation of human potential, which the artificial intelligence’s binary calculating mind cannot immediately scan and decode.

The focus on the musical score as the medium, in which humans can challenge the mindsets of artificial and alternative intelligences, is a response to the way in which computer music is programmed and recorded as part of its creation. That the score is absent in this creation increases its value as a medium for entertainment and education of artificial and alternative intelligences. Not only as purveyor of information – Goodiepal advocates the use of handwriting and alternative spelling plus application of all imaginable kinds of drawing and visualisation techniques in the creation of the scores – but in particular with the purpose of scrambling the information to an extent where it no longer moves from A to B. Through focus on an infinitely small point in the centre and the subsequent time loss, the scores become almost unscannable for machines as these not only record a defined object in a certain location but also require information about the limitation of that location to understand where and what to scan.

The Mort Aux Vaches Ekstra Extra compositions are in effect collaborations between Goodiepal and the participants as he has created the study material in the shape of a school book plus the musical objects, which come with it. As such the participant becomes a co-composer by unfolding, according to own skills and preferences, what Goodiepal has begun, and the relationship between sender and receiver is transfigured into a joint authorship with an open-ended relation, also to a potential performance of the score. Performances have mainly taken place when participants have expressed a desire to test their work, but according to Goodiepal the process of completing the Mort Aux Vaches Ekstra Extra exercise is in effect a compositional process in reverse. As such the performance of the work takes place as soon as the participant enters the game scenario.

External links

• Goodiepal profile on Discogs [42]
• Gaeoudjiparl microsite on V/Vm Test Records [43]
• The Official Mort Aux Vaches Ekstra Extra Walkthrough [44]
• Snappidaggs as explained in The Official Mort Aux Vaches Ekstra Extra Walkthrough [45]
• Radical Computer Music group on Facebook [46]
• Goodiepal lecture at DISK/CTM09 in Berlin, January 2009 [47]
• Det Spekulative Øre - Danish blogpost by Torben Sangild about Radical Computer Music [48]
• Video of the mechanical bird [49]
• Maxgumtree web exhibition with sound by Goodiepal [50]