Goodiepal - The Pruttipal Index

What is - or rather: what could be - a "Pruttipal Index"? In books, libraries and databases, an index is usually a concise overview or inventory. It suggests that this album could be a mini-encyclopedia of the work of its makers. In economics, indexes are measurements of the current state of an economy; which, in the case of this album, could be a vitality metrics of the Goodiepal & Pals/GP&PLS/BananSkole collective that produced it. In semiotics, an index is a sign that functions as a trace (like smoke as an index of fire). Because of their technology, vinyl records are indexical (with their grooves being indexes of sound waves), but in addition, this album could also be seen as a series of sonic traces, or footprints, left by the various activities of GP&PLS and Pruttipal over the eight years of their collective existence.

On this album, these traces can be heard literally: in references to the collective's anti-racist refugee activism on the borders of the European Union and activist dance moves (from which many of the melodies on this album have been taken), their open and non-hierarchical school BananSkole, their lived friction with the institutional art system (which escalated during their residency at Copenhagen's contemporary art institute Den Frie), as sometimes casual field and home recordings, and sometimes as highly produced studio recordings, featuring the voices of many of the collective's members, including the children.

Everyday life, creative and social practice, learning and experimentation are constantly interwoven in these recordings. This is reminiscent of other experimental living, learning and music-making communities since the early 1970s, such as the French experimental ICEM/Freinet schools.^[Whose recordings have recently been re-released by GP&PLS's collaborators Woodstone Kugelblitz.]

While the solo artist also known as Goodiepal can still be heard on this album - in spoken tracks and what sounds like half-improvised electronic pieces -, s/he has become gradually disguised and dissolved. The "Pruttipal Index" is thus a record of their latest self-reinvention, as they have been reinventing themselves periodically since the 1990s, including their latest identity Pruttipal, taken from the Danish word "prut" meaning "fart". Pruttipal may have become a boring old fart, or the fart may be a joke on the perceived noises of experimental music or the seeming casualness of the recordings.

There is, audibly, an eclectic stylistic mix of theater, group improvisation, choirs, folk music and children's songs, campy-ironic modular synthesizer electronics, highly-produced art rock and no wave jazz, heavy metal, techno, punk and catchy Scandinavian dance pop tunes interspersed with mock-conspiracy podcasting. Much of it could be called functional music derived from collective social performances to be reused for new collective social performances.

The claim that "it doesn't matter what the music sounds like [...] but how it is distributed" ("Fap Brev Til: Keith Fullerton BS-OS") could be the crypto-motto of this album - if one understands "distribution" in the broadest possible sense.

- Florian Cramer