CHICAGO - DANISH MAD PROFESSOR ON THE LOOSE IN THE INTERNET

Parl Kristian Bjorn Vester’s a literal weirdbeard with a self-perpetuated lore that includes pig farming, several years of assisting the elderly on a remote Scandinavian island, as well as running a small black market selling stolen cell phones to Russia. Divergent endeavors aside, the Danish ex-pat now living in London is best known as experimental electronic music composer Goodiepal. He also goes by Gaeoudjiparl Van Den Dobbelsteen, Mainpal Inv., or just Kristian Vester. He says he scrambles his name to confuse the internet. Ok then.

I heard a couple weeks ago he trotted into the Wire magazine office unbidden and used all of his savings to buy out half their advertisement space in order to promote his ideas about radical computer music. Gutsy, but who the hell cares about computer music these days besides anyone with that awful labret piercing? Actually his ideas—mostly about how stupid it is to allow the computer, as a tool, to determine the shape, type, and sequence of a composer’s thoughts—as well as a nice helping of good old-fashioned trash talk, are so inflammatory they’ve landed him on his peers’ shit lists. While strolling a dark street near his home late one night a couple months ago, an electronic musician he knows but won’t publicly identify smashed a beer bottle over his head.

All of his clients, from Nokia to NASA, the 2005 World Expo to Warner Brothers, have employed his genius, knowing that they will most likely eventually come to regret it. Vester’s hacked almost all the work he’s ever done, repackaging and selling exclusive and trademarked material. He’s also invented his own instruments, such as a tiny, intelligent mechanical bird that creates sounds as it pecks and flits inside a bell jar (check out the video below), and a model version of the solar system in which twisting planets makes the universe sing. Last year he self-published an educational textbook in radical computer music called Mort Aux Vaches Ekstra Extra.

From 2003 until spring this year Vester taught music composition and the history of electroacoustic music at the Royal Danish Academy of Music, and in that time span lectured at Princeton, Brown, and Cal-Arts on similar topics. But “no one wanted to challenge the format of computer music,” he says, “or more importantly, the machine itself. Why speak to a computer on its own terms?” Well, honestly dude, it’s because the computer won’t function if you don’t, but let’s suppose we live in a world without limitations, where computers can cook a gourmet breakfast for me and Asia Argento in the morning after having crazy sex all night, which we'll gobble up giggling before resuming. So in that world, he says, why work within a machine’s guidelines instead of living up to your own potential as a composer, you pantywaist? This theoretical problem irritated him so much that he quit his teaching job and declared war on the Academy, as well as “all those who allow themselves to be dominated in compositional form by a machine.”

For the last few decades, Vester points out, programmers have been promising the public that soon, any day now really, computers will be smarter than humans, and “that utopian dream keeps getting pushed further and further in front of us,” he says. “We’ve frozen machines in data form.” He wants computers to be able to take any and all direction, which is pretty damn terrifying, but we're only talking about music here. In order for intelligent machines to begin to understand the human experience, he argues, we have to “dive deep into the essence of being or thinking like a human and stop pretending that we are machines too.”

He keeps a swarm of inside jokes with himself and hides them in wild parenthesis, so that anyone trying to explain even one facet of his work gets helplessly lost. Here, I'm going to do it; watch what happens. Last year Vester released that textbook, called Mort Aux Vaches Ekstra Extra­—a play on his own intro-slash-retrospective Mort Aux Vaches Ekstra, which is a play on the Dutch record label Staalplat “Mort Aux Vaches” series, for which he’s released a CD. Wait, it gets even more annoyingly complicated. A one-off package of custom and hand-cut pieces of vinyl leftovers from Mort Aux Vaches Ekstra and text, each copy of Mort Aux Vaches Ekstra Extra, once completed, becomes a one-of-a-kind piece of visual art and musical score. It’s absolutely confusing. Just scratch your head and move on.

The actual book starts out pretty innocuous, a glorified photocopied pamphlet. In classes, he instructs students to draw, cut out shapes on specific pages, fold, paste in objects, tear out anything they don’t like—basically transform it into a sculptural object that represents the music they want to create. It’s supposed to be educational, but once the student autographs it, the book becomes a collaborative composition with Vester, who figures he’s given you the mindset for the composition. The student's allowed to sell it, and she gets to determine which percentage she feels like giving Vester. (He doesn’t believe in charging a fixed price for any of his music, or the book, or even his classes—in fact, he doesn’t even believe in the concept of money. As incentive and reward for activating your brain, if you’re clever enough you can get anything he’s done for free. And no, I’m not sharing tips.)

“Let’s challenge the score, make it unreadable by computers,” says Vester. And while we’re at it, he says, why not do away with the time-old tradition of a composer scoring music for others to play? “This time I do the music and you do the notation,” he says, meaning the score will be generated after the music, like taking dictation.

Vester cites a metaphor he’s invented that boils down cultural phenomena into hypothetical specks of information. “We have been documenting ourselves to a point where we have our culture down to single dots,” he says, and by dots he means whole quantum fields of information relevant to only one specific subject. In his class he gives examples of such dots—Pink Floyd’s The Wall comes up a lot—and then tells students to imagine themselves pulled with equal force by each dot, notating what happens right there in the middle. “Now,” he says, “put a pencil in the book and start composing!”

If that sounds like a real boggler, raise your hand. (Now put your hand down—you’re alone in your room reading this, for crying out loud.) Most of his exercises are hypothetical and arbitrary, and even he doesn’t attest to their usefulness in any kind of way. Here’s where quite a few issues with conventional logic arise: For starters, what good is taking a class to make music if you’re not actually making music, just an unreadable score? It’s hard to tell if he’s bullshitting or crazy or actually brilliant, but you know what? Fuck conventional logic. Life’s more fun when you think like a lunatic.

In true lunatic fashion, every weekday morning for an hour and ten minutes only (9 to 10:10 AM) he answers the door to his house to accept job opportunities laid at his feet (lately it’s been fixing clocks). He also takes in anyone interested in having a chat about time, music, or technology, and this is where he finds students for his class. “Some of them are highly academic,” he says, and “some are or could be locked up in a mental hospital. They are very, very action-packed and I love every single one of them. If you ring the doorbell here that means you are probably described by the surrounding world as a freak.”

While giving instructions, Vester constantly changes his own accent, often switching among languages (even ones he’s made up), using strange cadences to prohibit binary mind comprehension. It’s not out of paranoia, but for the sake of interestingness, because he is sentient, mobile, and breathing, and he can. This is the key to all he is saying; his class is as much instruction as diatribe. By using a computer to relate to life in such specific way that it can no longer be understood or translated by a computer, we come away with a uniquely human experience. So really, it’s not so much about changing technology as changing the way we process the world.

He’s leading a live class online tomorrow at 7 PM CST through Chicago’s i^3 hypermedia. It takes place in real time (as most of us understand it), with a bunch of people in the room at once and Vester speaking through Skype, providing images here and there. Anyone who wants to can follow him through Skype too; you’ll find instructions through i^3.

LIZ ARMSTRONG

Comments

[bob]

This guy is just an insufferable fool. When I run into folks like him who say shit like "no one wanted to challenge the format of computer music,” he says, “or more importantly, the machine itself" it gives me bad, bad flashbacks of all the useless nerds I worked with in English Lit grad school. Ivory tower, privileged white boys ad nauseum. Nice beard.

[J.E.B.]

I'm not ivory tower (and have no labret piercing, thank you, Ms. Armstrong)but I think this guy is brilliant.

Not anything he does with music, mind you, but what you do when he gets you going.

[ULRICH VORMANN]

If you are a Gaeoudjiparl fan you really really have to see this...

It’s out of this world..

http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2008/01/goodiepal-and-t.html

and

http://www.vimeo.com/710236

Seriously, if you ever get the chance to see him live - DO SO IMMEDIATELY! He is side-splittingly funny, and has a great range of stories about living in the back end of beyond…

[Elliot]

i wish i could be roommates with this guy.

[xavier]

This guy must be a fucking loser

[ULRICH VORMANN]

Goodiepal is the fucking best!

[ULRICH VORMANN]

You also have to see this video you really have to...!

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http://musicthing.blogspot.com/2007/03/goodiepal-this-video-will-blow-your.html

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Here is atranscription/ translation af the dialogue for those who might be interested...

Mikael: Countless viewers have asked us "Who has composed the title score of this show?". Now I can welcome Goodiepal, and you have composed the music we play.
Goodiepal: Yeah, I would say so, yeah.
M: I would like to thank you for that.
G: You are welcome.
M: You have come here in order to play a completely different piece of music.
G: Well, I have come here because you asked me to come and play some more music, and I would like to do that. Thus I have have brought this thing with me.
M: So this is a piece of music here on the table now?
G: No, it is an object of music. It is an object that gives me the opportunity to play music, but it is also a tableau.
M: It is a transport box that you travel with a lot?
G: Yeah, I do.
M: Where has it been in the world?
G: The box has been to, eh .. Faroe Islands, Russia, USA, it's been to Austria, eh, Japan, it has been around.
M: When you travel with this box, what do you do? You perform as a musician?
G: Eh.. yeah, performing artist of harmony, you could call it.
M: Besides that, you also teach?
G: Yes, well I am a teacher at the Music Conservatory of Jutland in Aarhus, and then I have been teaching as stand in at different foreign universities.
M: Some of which are labeled Ivy League Universities with a fancy word?
G: I can't answer that question, because I dont know what that means.
M: Among others Princeton in New York...
G: Nah, New Jersey... Brown University, CalArts - Californian Institute of the Arts, and .... eh, yeah
M: Which subject do you teach?
G: I teach what with a ugly notion is called "History and aesthetics of Electronic Music". And that notion leads to the question: "What is electronic music?" and I will claim that it is a watered-down notion. Everything is electronic music today, everything that uses elctricity, amplified in one way or the other is electronic music. So it is a nonsense notion that universities and conservatories etc. still use. I prefer to call it "predetermined music" but I accept talking of electronic music as a modern notion.
M: But there are no cables connected to this box?
G: No, I have an idea of a basic structure of mechanical music, electronic music and computer music as three building blocks on top of each other, i.e. there are mechanical parts in electronics and electronical parts in computers. And I have chosen for a while to dive deeper into mechanical music instead of electronical music.
M: Mechanical music. So this box contains something that can play mechnical music. Should we try to open the box?
G: Yes, let us do that.
M: So I will get us a microphone.
G: OK, there we go.
M: What is that?
G: That is a mechanical bird. Actually there are two mechanical birds. That is a piece of work that I have build.
M: You have build it yourself?
G: Everything I do I build myself - generally speaking.
M: What have you used for building it?
G: Eh, equal amounts of clockwork, and stuff.. wood ...
M: So the gears and the mechanical parts we can see in the bottom of the glass case is from a clockwork?
G: That is correct. The idea has been to make an world separated from the mechanical parts. So we have kind of a illusion up here. I am very intereseted in isolated worlds, confined realities. I have met a lot of people describing this box as a work of art, but I disagree completly with that. It is piece of mechanics. It does not ask any questions. It is not a piece of art, it is a concluded mechanical process that can be used to perform musical riuals or musical sequences. Rituals is too big a word.
M: So the lower part is the mechanical part?
G: Yes, and then there is the black line here, and then the birds on top.
M: If we look closely on the birds we can see skulls and bones, and that is made by paper?
G: Most of it is made of paper and things I have carved out of wood and plastic. But all of this is paper. And then there are two planets here in the top that can move forth and back.
M: Two planets?
G: Yes, there are two planet. There and there. Well, that is what it can do.
M: So when you have been to - say - Moscow with this one, how do you perform then?
G: I have always been very interested in the idea of the borders between human and machines. It is a classical phenomenon in modern litterature and electronic music as such.
M: Science fiction?
G: Well, like in science fiction. What started me was once when I saw Sony's Ibo-dog. It is very advanced. But I have never felt...
M: That is a little white dog that can move to music?
G: No, but you can program it and it can return to you etc. But you don't feel that it is alive for just one second. I wanted a piece of mechanics or complex piece of activity that is so complex that it can give the illusion of being alive. So i built this one. And when you enter the world of physics, it is easy to get a feeling af complexity playing a part. Once I carried this machine outside and the machine suddently misted up on the inside inside and started to whistle.
M: So the difference in temperature made it play?
G: Yes, it started the bellows and the bird started whistling. For a while I had the feeling that I had created a something living. And that is enough for me.
M: When you were in Torshavn, Faroe Islands, what did you do there?
G: I was on a Psycriatic Hospital doing musical therapy for the patients.
M: Should we try to do that here?
G: I don't want to do musical therapy here since there are no patients here.
M: Ah, (laughs and point to the camera) then you ought to see some of the mails we get from our viewers.
G: OK, I would prefer to perform a little ritual showing how to blow spirit into the machine and then ...
M: See what happens ...
G: And then returning to zero. So at first I start to blow. (Whistles and plays on the mechanincal bird) And then it more or less takes care of itself.
M: Fantastic. I have never seen anything like that.
G: Yeah.
M: Over here we have some more stuff of yours.
G: Over there we have a planetary scenario that normally is a musical game platform that I use in my music. I have made a planetary game where I move the planets around.
M: So these are planets?
G: Yes, they are all planets, there is one missing. There. Erh, it is a set of planets that i play with and they each have a tonal value. It takes very long time so I prefer to illustrate how it works instead of playing a whole game. I whistle the planets and then these ones strike the planets out of play. (starts to whistle, ring bells etc.) And that would continue untill there has been an astral scenario.
M: What did we hear in this piece? Is this planet Earth?
G: It could be. It could also by a mirroring of planet Earth. It is close to be planet Earth, yeah. It is a parallel universe. I have for a long time been interested in the way we as humans understand the solar system rather than how it is. It is like we still don't understand true spaciousness with time. We want to squeeze it flat. I collect computer programs that simulate the stars and none of them gives me the feeling of an opportunity to dissappear in the sky of stars. So I was interested in creating a flat planetary scenario with a negative universe on the other side where the planets can fall through. Like this.
M: Arhh.
G: I don't know if you know that old classic Flatland where the universe is two-dimensional. These are the same rules in this game. So no planet is taller than the others. They all move around in a flat universe and we as humans can then observe it in the same way we see it when we are poetic not scientific.
M: Goodiepal, I know that you are on your way to the airpot. You are leaving Denmark very soon. Thank you very much for coming and playing two other pieces of music than the title score. Please come back again.
G: I would like to. Erh, it depends on the circumstances.
M: Of course.

[KRSHVie]

This humanoid is a very fascinating life form to be acquainted with. He has the ability to stimulate your brainwaves in a positive way. It will make you a sound(er) entity.

[hate 04]

This guy is just an insufferable fool.

[WEST EAST]

GOODIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEPAAAAALLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL

we love you!