The Danish artist Goodiepal has floated around the margins of The Sound Projector radar for a few years now, occasionally sending bizarre items our way including (I think) a shaped vinyl disc that resembled a circular saw, not possible to play on a turntable of course, and as I remember it, was engraved with runic etchings and peculiar messages. Likewise the very confusing Mort Aux Vaches release with a possibly unplayable CDR and a viking ship on the cover. If there was any commonality among these things, it was that you couldn’t work out who Goodiepal was or even if he had anything to do with the records. The only clue was his distinctive handwriting, which is a beautiful cursive script which he must have spent years cultivating (and at one time he even used a fountain pen, a virtually archaic device in the 21st century).
Said handwriting appears on the envelope for today’s absurdist record, a 2-CD set called The Pruttipal Index (FUTURA RESISTENZA RESCD002), and there’s also a personalised greeting card with a rather cryptic message to me from Goodiepal himself. Good job I’m not mentally ill, or I might read too much into that message. At time of writing, I’m worming my way like a demented centipede through the first disc, only to encounter a wild and perplexing array of sonic information: crazed folk-like songs, heavy metal, drum and bass, bizarre minimal electronics, spoken word, and many other boiled sweets bobbing around in the casserole which simply can’t be described. Often a track will contain five or eighteen ideas drawn from the pool of creativity above, and edit between them furiously, adding further to the confusion. In vain does the hapless listener turn to the digipak or enclosed booklet for any helpful information…the covers are strange collages of mixed messages, fragments, and images, much like a Mark E. Smith cut-up, and the booklet appears to be derived from a multi-lingual international conversation that took place on WhatsApp – describing something so obscure and marginal that even the participants weren’t sure what it might mean. There’s information lettered on the discs to distinguish one crazy track from another, but it’s arranged every which way, almost Dadaist in composition, full of Danish words, and names I do not recognise. So far we might as well be getting transmissions from Jupiter.
This might or might not have something to do with the National Gallery of Denmark, where (allegedly) our man Goodiepal has been installed in a gallery room since 2012 and hosting all manner of “free activity”, which could mean almost anything. He even claims to be “squatting” there, as if he wasn’t invited and he’s doing it all illegally, but it doesn’t matter anyway since the museum has no money. I can guess from all these clues that The Pruttipal Index is a very collaborative endeavour which features various crazy Danes, non-artists and non-musicians, and probably similar outcasts from the rest of Europe too, but we’ll probably never know for sure; I suppose, in my limited experience, some creators who come close to breathing this same sort of unhinged mayhem and perplexing art-prankery are the Chocolate Monk CDR label in the UK, and Ogrob and his crew in France (and associated releases by Astatine and others, and the work of the Doubtful Sounds label). I’ll admit that in the final analysis I have no idea what to make of The Pruttipal Index, but I still love it – I enjoy listening to it and I enjoy being baffled by it. The efforts of Goodiepal to remain mysterious and unknowable are really paying off, even though we do know his real name and everything, and in his own zanoid manner he’s managed to pull off the same “cloak of invisibility” trick as the mysterious Xentos in the UK, the master of the slippery eel. (For further info, may I refer the reader to my 2020 review of the Mental LP).
One day, when my brain is feeling less scrambled, I will broach the second CD and let it fry my noggin, and also see what happens when I insert the cover-mount USB key into a suitable slot. In the meantime, I leave you with Goodiepal’s message to me: “I have gotten to[o] old to play alone and about 7 years ago I started a band & we moved to the Balkans.” And you know what? He’s right! Moving to the Balkans is about the only way left for any of us to go. From 25th April 2023.