Son[i]a #272
Goodiepal & Pals
This podcast is part of Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union. Music commissioned to Goodiepal & Pals. Editing by Anna Ramos.
The Dane Goodiepal has invested all his time and energy in avoiding stereotypes and expectations. His crusade for radical pedagogy and sci-fi speculation with graphical notation so as not to bore the artificial intelligence to come, is now going through a more political phase. Even more than when he decided to drastically cut his carbon footprint and built Kommunal Komputer Klon 2, a customised bike -now part of the SMK Collection- that he used as his only means for travelling, when he was booked for his talks, concerts, workshops or whatever.
In 2016, the ‘trickster’s trickster’ announced on the networks that he was ‘too old to perform on his own’, so he created a new group, together with Oliver Laumann, Dønny Fortrængning, Nynne Roberta Pedersen Pedersen 1 & Nynne Roberta Pedersen 2, Sara Nigard Rosendal and others, mostly active in Germany, Scandinavia and the Balkans. In this new format, art gives room to activism, with interventions in refugee camps, stopping deportations and other hacks of the system.
In this podcast, Goodiepal plays a borrowed Casiotone VL-1 VL-Tone and we talk about art’s failure to have real impact, the best place to hide stuff, contracts and hacks, double standards in Europe, creativity in sheer survival strategies, Climate refugees, genocides in the making, modern afro-futurism, Radical Computer Music and circuit bending.
Lars Holdhus/TCF
The work of the sound artist Lars Holdhus, aka TCF, interrogates our relation to the technological infrastructures that permeate contemporaneity through language, code, cryptography and, most recently, ecology. En este podcast, Lars aboga por la presencia y la conciencia. Between tea sips, he reflects on toolmaking and impact, A.I. and the obsession with flesh, human time and machine time. He also points out how boring technology becomes when you are 70% Buddhist, while introducing us to his latest projects: a virtual touring software teasing the limits of the live music industry and a random processing tool that he feeds and confronts to compose and create images.
John Richards/Dirty Electronics
The improviser and maker John Richards describes the challenge of recording a performance-based practice and opens up his Dirty Electronics praxis through props and projects. He also tells us about the Luddites and Leicester, touches on his views on functionality, control, and safety nets, and talks about his approach to speculative circuitry, authorship and composition.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Goodiepal that we were unable to include the first time around.
EVOL
Roc Jiménez de Cisneros talks about EVOL’s very free deconstruction and reinterpretation of György Ligeti's 'Continuum' and Hanne Darboven’s 'Opus 17A', and how these works relate to the duo's current artistic practice. Unusual notions of time in relation to music, algorithmic reverse engineering, complexity through simplicity, anti-climax, ancient trance music, weird mental states and Dick Higgins’ Superboredom concept pop up in the conversation.