Your host is positively thrilled to serve up the first item on Groove Cafe’s 2019 menu, the phenomenal digital album/radio broadcast by Goodiepal & Pals, 100% Pro-Monarchist X-tra Kone Radio. It’s a mind-boggling two hours of, as the tag says, “pure anti-totalitarian communism straight to your radio.”
That means talk about Denmark’s racist refugee policy and the long tail of colonialism, blistering tekno rock in that’s sort of sounds like Henry Cow, musings on Gabber, demented electronic jams, anti–police poetry, and a half-hour of totally warped free music. It’s a journey, very worth your $10. Hell, play it on the actual radio if you want. I’m sure the Pals would appreciate that.
The collaboration between Goodiepal and Groove Cafe started when I put together a screening of The Goodiepal Equation at Digital Art Demo Space here in Chicago. While listening to an episode of the Are.an podcast featuring GP&PLS, I learned that the band is traveling Europe to work with refugees seeking asylum (state-sanctioned or otherwise) in the EU. That podcast is really worth listening to for some information about their activism. They talk about buying phone cards to refugees can contact their families and shoes for when the refugees must run from police, of the members of the bands who can’t tour with the GP&PLS since they are forbidden from leaving the refugee camps where they wait in legal purgatory.
So, I sent Goodiepal a message over Skype offering to put out an album on Groove Cafe to raise some funds for their efforts and he said great, let’s put it out January 1, 2019. That was just over three weeks away at the time. I had no idea that in three weeks he’d send over a 2-hour recording this ambitious, this excellent, and this politically incisive.
100% Pro-Monarchist X-tra Kone Radio is such an exciting album because it’s the rare piece of explicitly political art that’s as joyous as it is urgent. Listening, you get electrified by the band’s conviction that we can and must fight racist totalitarian state power that views citizenship as a handy tool for weeding out Africans and Arabs, that we can and must collaborate with each other to make sure that arbitrary borders don’t deprive our fellow humans of the resources and safety we citizens of wealthy countries are so privileged to. The band has uses their exuberant music to spread an infectious energy that can empower you when confronting monolithic global phenomena like authoritarianism, like populist right-wing extremist movements, like climate change.
Goodiepal has been releasing music since the ’90s on countless labels, but is probably most well known for his Editions Mego albums and series of subversive hi-jinks and lectures on radical computer music. He started playing and working with the Pals within he past couple of years.
Here is some text that GP&PLS member Nynne Roberta Pedersen wrote for the album release:
Gp&pls is a refugee organization disguised as a tech rock band
And we are also a hot and hardcore feminist movement. And we are also a pro monarchist polygamist extratone orchestra. And we make anti-authoritarian communist tunes for you and your family.GP&PLS is supporting people on the move who are trying to enter Europe, but because of violent borders and euro racism have a hard time moving around and making livable lives.
GP&PlS believe that if you have a powerful passport it is your duty to help and involve with the people who don’t. If you have a powerful position in society, such as friends, education and money, it’s your duty to share it.
All money that this album make will go straight to the pockets of stranded refugees on the European border:
Money for border-crossing tools, such as shoes and clothes when you have to hide in the forest for days, bandages and medicine for when police have beaten you up. Cellphone and credit so you can gps your way into EU and you can keep in contact with your family and friends at home.100% pro-monarchist x-tra kone radio
– a western world political weather forecast for 2019It’s a magnum opus which holds stories from the Mediterranean sea, the far north, the life on a pig farm, the pro life movement of Denmark, Dutch-Mexican avant-garde acid, and plenty more.
100%næste kærliglighed since the birth og Jesus Christ!
No border no nation!