The Danish-Faroese composer, lecturer and trickster behind Radical Computer Music: the DIEM professor who declared intellectual war on the trivialisation of computer music, walked out, and took the argument to 150 universities by home-built bicycle.
Goodiepal is the composer as trickster, and the Bureau files him at Tier III as a singular avant-garde provocateur whose concerns sit unusually close to this archive's own. Born Parl Kristian Bjørn Vester in 1974, Danish and Faroese, he performs under that name and a string of others, Gæoudjiparl van den Dobbelsteen among them, and is by training a horologist as well as a musician, performance artist, lecturer and activist. The eccentricity is real, but it carries a serious argument.
The shape of him was set early. He was sent to a Rudolf Steiner school where electronics were forbidden, and reached computers by the side door, through the demoscene, trading floppy-disc demos for Commodore and Amiga machines and teaching himself UNIX and code. The prohibition seems to have produced the lifelong obsession rather than prevented it.
From 2004 to 2008 he held a real academic post: professor of the history and aesthetics of electronic music, and head of the department, at DIEM, the Danish Institute of Electro-acoustic Music at the Royal Academy of Music in Aarhus. It was there that he coined Radical Computer Music, the idea that gives him his place here: music notated not by computer networks but for them, a gesture aimed at the machine and at the artificial intelligence he expected to grow out of it. Where the field said AI, he proposed ALI, alternative intelligence, and argued that computer music and media art had surrendered their utopian charge to mere documentation.
His demonstration of the idea was Mort Aux Vaches Ekstra Extra, a compositional game-scenario built to interrogate the roles of composer, time, notation and medium, a score made to be passed on and mutated rather than fixed. And when he left Aarhus in 2008 he did so with a manifesto, Five steps in a Gentleman's War on the stupidity of modern computer music and media based art, a declared intellectual war on trivialisation. He gave up the professorship and, in his own words, married the road.
What followed was a life made into the work. He built the Kommunal Klon Komputer velomobiles he travels in, selling one to the National Gallery of Denmark in 2014, where it is now on display, and carried his lecture-performances to some 150 universities, blurring talk and concert, theory and story. His records appeared on V/Vm Test, Editions Mego, Fonal and Alku, he wrote two books including the travelogue El Camino del Hardcore, and in 2017 he became the subject of a feature documentary, The Goodiepal Equation.
The Bureau files Goodiepal at Artists · Tier III as the composer-as-trickster: a figure whose home was the V/Vm Test and Editions Mego end of the avant-garde, and whose war on trivialisation and early unease about machine intelligence place him squarely in the anti-commercial, anti-complacent tradition this archive keeps.