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
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