MAVERICK Danish/Faroese musician, composer, artist, educator, activist, hacker and trickster; Goodiepal turns 50 this month and to celebrate, Footprints of Unseen Hands have organised a trip to Ireland where he will be performing in Limerick on Sunday January 28 at Ormston House at 7pm. Tickets are €10.
Goodiepal is noted for his eccentric approach to sound, media art and performance, pushing the boundaries of traditional music genres.
Blurring the lines between performance and lecture, his shows are embellished with stories, theoretical expositions, and surprising instrumentation.
His interests in computer technology and alternative intelligence contributed to the development of his ideas on “radical computer music.”. This former lecturer at the Royal Academy of Music in Aarhus, Denmark, has since declared intellectual war against the stupidity in modern computer music and media art.
Goodiepal has published several books including Radikal Computer Music and El Camino del Hardcore. The former, in part being an attempt to break with the linear approach to writing scores, the latter an autobiographical travelogue of his time on Kommunal Klon Computer 2, his self-built electricity-producing velomobile in which he travelled throughout Europe.
Testament to his idea on sustainability and techno-socialism the energy generated by his pedalling was often used to power his performances, lectures and concerts. This bike has now been retired and is on permanent display at the National Gallery of Denmark.
With hundreds of releases to his name(s), he is continuously challenging the established norms of a ‘release’. He famously put out records containing signed blank cheques, his debit card details and even an album containing a 500 Kroner note which was twice the price of the record.
In 2017 he was the subject of a feature length documentary called The Goodiepal Equation, filmed from 2011 to 2017 and released on Finnish experimental record label Fonal Records.
More recently Goodiepal has created a free synth library on the Faroe Islands, established Bananskolen (‘Banana School’) a self-organised alternative school based in Copenhagen where everyone is a student and teacher at the same time.
