To celebrate Brian Eno’s birthday on Saturday, May 15th, Endlesss will livestream a 12-hour “Tribute to Oblique Strategies” jam featuring members of. Short circuit (example: a man eating peas with the idea that they will improve his virility shovels them straight into his lap). Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies – the Ultimate Music Production Tool April 29, 2009 By Ian Shepherd Forget computers and plugins, forget pop shields, forget the SwirlyGig, forget SSL desks and tantric breathing exercises – forget all that stuff, and open your mind to a real music production tool – the Oblique Strategies. The Oblique Strategies Web Site. The Oblique Strategies. The fifth edition of the Oblique Strategies is now available! You can get your own deck (without impoverishing yourself as an eBay bidder) by clicking here. Oblique Strategies ©1975, 1978, and 1979 Brian Eno/Peter Schmidt. This web page © 1997-2003 Gregory Taylor.

1. Brian Eno Oblique Strategies
2. Brian Eno Oblique Strategies App
3. Brian Eno Oblique Strategies List

Oblique Strategies (subtitled Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas) is a card-based method for promoting creativity jointly created by musician/artist Brian Eno and multimedia artist Peter Schmidt, first published in 1975. Physically, it takes the form of a deck of 7-by-9-centimetre (2.8 in × 3.5 in) printed cards in a black box.^[1][2][3] Each card offers a challenging constraint intended to help artists (particularly musicians) break creative blocks by encouraging lateral thinking.

Origin and history[edit]

In 1970, Peter Schmidt created 'The Thoughts Behind the Thoughts',^[4] a box containing 55 sentences letterpress printed onto disused prints that accumulated in his studio, which is still in Eno's possession. Eno, who had known Schmidt since the late 1960s, had been pursuing a similar project himself, which he had handwritten onto a number of bamboo cards and given the name 'Oblique Strategies' in 1974. There was a significant overlap between the two projects, and so, in late 1974, Schmidt and Eno combined them into a single pack of cards and offered them for general sale. The set went through three limited edition printings before Schmidt suddenly died in early 1980, after which the card decks became rather rare and expensive. Sixteen years later software pioneer Peter Norton convinced Eno to let him create a fourth edition as Christmas gifts for his friends (not for sale, although they occasionally come up at auction). Eno's decision to revisit the cards and his collaboration with Norton in revising them is described in detail in his 1996 book A Year with Swollen Appendices. With public interest in the cards undiminished, in 2001 Eno once again produced a new set of Oblique Strategies cards. The number and content of the cards vary according to the edition. In May 2013 a limited edition of 500 boxes, in burgundy rather than black, was issued.

Brian Eno Oblique Strategies

Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies. Duration: 04:53 25 mins ago. Apr.08 - Having a creative block? Brian Eno wants you to play with his deck of cards made for.

The story of Oblique Strategies, along with the content of all the cards, exhaustive history and commentary, is documented in a website widely acknowledged as the authoritative source and put together by musician and educator Gregory Alan Taylor.^[5]

The text of Schmidt's 'The Thoughts Behind the Thoughts' was published by Mindmade Books in 2012.

Design and use[edit]

Each card contains a gnomic suggestion, aphorism or remark which can be used to break a deadlock or dilemma situation. A few are specific to music composition; others are more general. For example:

• Use an old idea.
• State the problem in words as clearly as possible.
• Only one element of each kind.
• What would your closest friend do?
• What to increase? What to reduce?
• Are there sections? Consider transitions.
• Try faking it!
• Honour thy error as a hidden intention.
• Ask your body.
• Work at a different speed.
• Gardening not Architecture.

From the introduction to the 2001 edition:

These cards evolved from separate observations of the principles underlying what we were doing. Sometimes they were recognised in retrospect (intellect catching up with intuition), sometimes they were identified as they were happening, sometimes they were formulated.They can be used as a pack, or by drawing a single card from the shuffled pack when a dilemma occurs in a working situation. In this case the card is trusted even if its appropriateness is quite unclear...

Cultural impact[edit]

References to Oblique Strategies exist in popular culture, notably in the film Slacker,^[6] in which a character offers passers-by cards from a deck. Strategies mentioned include 'Honor thy error as a hidden intention', 'Look closely at the most embarrassing details and amplify', 'Not building a wall; making a brick', 'Repetition is a form of change', and one which came to be seen as a summary of the film's ethos (though it was not part of the official set of Oblique Strategies), 'Withdrawing in disgust is not the same thing as apathy.' This line was quoted in the 1994 song 'What's the Frequency, Kenneth?' by R.E.M., who also mentioned Oblique Strategies in their 1998 song 'Diminished' from the album Up. The Oblique Strategies are also referenced in comic 1018, 'Oblique Angles',^[7] of popular web comic Questionable Content.

Other musicians inspired by Oblique Strategies include the British band Coldplay, said to have used the cards when recording their 2008 Brian Eno-produced album Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends and French band Phoenix, who used the cards when recording their 2009 album Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix.^[8] German musician/composer Blixa Bargeld has a similar navigation system, called Dave. In response to their song 'Brian Eno', from their album Congratulations, MGMT has said they had a deck of Oblique Strategies in the studio, but they 'don't know if [they] used them correctly.'

They were most famously used by Eno during the recording of David Bowie's Berlin triptych of albums (Low, 'Heroes', Lodger). Stories suggest they were used during the recording of instrumentals on 'Heroes' such as 'Sense of Doubt' and were used more extensively on Lodger ('Fantastic Voyage', 'Boys Keep Swinging', 'Red Money'). They were used again on Bowie's 1995 album Outside, which Eno was involved with as a writer, producer and musician. Carlos Alomar, who worked with Eno and Bowie on all these albums, was a fan of using the cards, later saying 'at the Center for Performing Arts at the Stevens Institute of Technology, where I teach, on the wall are Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies cards. And when my students get a mental block, I immediately direct them to that wall.'^[9]

Editions and variations[edit]

See also[edit]

• The Lookout (album), written in part with a similar process to Oblique Strategies

References[edit]

1. ^'Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies – the Ultimate Music Production Tool'. Productionadvice.co.uk. 2009-04-29. Retrieved 2013-09-20.
2. ^Sasha Frere-Jones (July 7, 2014). 'Ambient Genius – The working life of Brian Eno'. The New Yorker. Retrieved 5 January 2018.
3. ^'h2g2 – Oblique Strategies'. BBC. Retrieved 2013-03-14.
4. ^Emr, John (2010-03-09). 'Peter Schmidt Web: 'The Thoughts Behind the Thoughts''. Peterschmidtweb.blogspot.com. Retrieved 2013-09-20.
5. ^'A Primer On Oblique Strategizing'. Rtqe.net. Retrieved 2013-09-20.
6. ^'Slacker's Oblique Strategy'. The Criterion Collection. Retrieved 2013-09-20.
7. ^'Oblique Angles'. Questionable Content.
8. ^'Phoenix (interview with Thomas Mars)'. Ear Farm.
9. ^'Carlos Alomar's Golden Years with David Bowie (Interview)'. Rock Cellar Magazine. 11 February 2016. Archived from the original on 13 February 2016. Retrieved 11 February 2016.
10. ^'The Oblique Strategies Web Site'. Rtqe.net. Retrieved 2013-09-20.
11. ^'Oblique Strategies'. Gruntose. Archived from the original on 2013-09-21. Retrieved 2014-09-29.
12. ^'Edition 2 (1978)'. Rtqe.net. Retrieved 2013-09-20.
13. ^personal collection
14. ^'Edition 3 (1979)'. Rtqe.net. Retrieved 2013-09-20.
15. ^'Brian Eno Is More Dark Than Shark'. Moredarkthanshark.org. Retrieved 2013-09-20.
16. ^'Consulting Other Sources'. Rtqe.net. Retrieved 2013-09-20.
17. ^'Consulting Other Sources'. Rtqe.net. Retrieved 2013-09-20.
18. ^'Edition 4 (1996)'. Rtqe.net. Retrieved 2013-09-20.
19. ^'A New Edition Appears (in a limited way)'. Rtqe.net. Retrieved 2013-09-20.
20. ^'Some Cards From Edition 4'. Rtqe.net. Retrieved 2013-09-20.
21. ^'Eno Shop Oblique Strategies'. www.enoshop.co.uk.
22. ^'Oblique Strategies Limited Numbered Edition'. Enoshop.co.uk. Retrieved 2013-09-20.
23. ^'ObliqueWare review'. music.hyperreal.org.
24. ^'ObliqueWare review'. Music.hyperreal.org. Retrieved 2013-09-20.
25. ^https://apps.apple.com/us/app/oblique-strategies-se/id1104927011
26. ^'sansumbrella/Processing-ObliqueStrategies'. GitHub.
27. ^'Oblique Strategies – Apps on Google Play'. play.google.com.

External links[edit]

• Brian Eno explains Oblique Strategies on Jarvis Cocker's BBC6 Radio show, November 8, 2010

The Oblique Strategies are a deck of cards. Up until 1996, they were quite easy to describe.They measured about 2-3/4'x 3-3/4'. They came in a small black box which said 'OBLIQUE STRATEGIES'on one of the top's long sides and 'BRIAN ENO/PETER SCHMIDT' onthe other side. The cards were solid black on one side, and had the aphorismsprinted in a 10-point sans serif face on the other.

That was then, and this is now. There is now another set of the ObliqueStrategies in existence, and it looks nothing like this; perhapsthe best way to think of the differences between the earlier versionsand the fourth edition deck is by analogy. Wherethe earlier versions were a quiet, well-dressed neighbor who, once you gotused to her/him, turned out to be a funny, intriguing, and frighteninglyprescient friend, the 1996 version is the equivalent of going to the otherapartment on your floor to ask directions to someplace and discovering a large, noisy party full of tipsy graduate students attempting some kind of fashionable dance en masse who pause only to give you advice in a half-dozenlanguages.

But I digress. Perhaps it's best to attempt a description of their intention and function.

The deck itself had its origins in the discovery by Brian Eno that bothhe and his friend Peter Schmidt (a British painter whose works grace thecover of 'Evening Star' and whose watercolours decorated the backLP cover of Eno's 'Before and After Science' and also appearedas full-size prints in a small number of the original releases)tended to keep a set of basic working principles which guided them throughthe kinds of moments of pressure - either working through a heavy paintingsession or watching the clock tick while you're running up a big buck studiobill. Both Schmidt and Eno realized that the pressures of time tended tosteer them away from the ways of thinking they found most productive whenthe pressure was off. The Strategies were, then, a way to remind themselvesof those habits of thinking - to jog the mind.

It is not clear from any sources I've run across whether the cards wereexplicitly intended to be oracular at the outset - that is, whether or notPeter Schmidt and Eno necessarily saw them exclusively as a 'singleinstruction/single response' kind of 'game'. The introductorycards included in all three versions of the first versions of the Oblique Strategies suggest otherwise.It seems clear, also, that the deck was not conceived of as a set of 'fixed'instructions, but rather a group of ideas to be added to or modified overtime; each of the three decks included 4 or 5 blank cards, intended to befilled and used as needed.

Eno discusses the Oblique Strategies at greatest length in an interviewwith Charles Amirkhanian, conducted at KPFA in Berkeley in early 1980:

Brian Eno Oblique Strategies App

'These cards evolved from our separate working procedures. It was one of the many cases during the friendship that he [Peter Schmidt] and I where we arrived at a working position at almost exactly the same time and almost in exactly the same words. There were times when we hadn't seen each other for a few months at a time sometimes, and upon remeeting or exchanging letters, we would find that we were in the same intellectual position - which was quite different from the one we'd been in prior to that.

The Oblique Strategies evolved from me being in a number of working situations when the panic of the situation - particularly in studios - tended to make me quickly forget that there were others ways of working and that there were tangential ways of attacking problems that were in many senses more interesting than the direct head-on approach. If you're in a panic, you tend to take the head-on approach because it seems to be the one that's going to yield the best results Of course, that often isn't the case - it's just the most obvious and - apparently - reliable method. The function of the Oblique Strategies was, initially, to serve as a series of prompts which said, 'Don't forget that you could adopt *this* attitude,' or 'Don't forget you could adopt *that* attitude.'

The first Oblique Strategy said 'Honour thy error as a hidden intention.' And, in fact, Peter's first Oblique Strategy - done quite independently and before either of us had become conscious that the other was doing that - was ...I think it was 'Was it really a mistake?' which was, of course, much the same kind of message. Well, I collected about fifteen or twenty of these and then I put them onto cards. At the same time, Peter had been keeping a little book of messages to himself as regards painting, and he'd kept those in a notebook. We were both very surprised to find the other not only using a similar system but also many of the messages being absolutely overlapping, you know...there was a complete correspondence between the messages. So subsequently we decided to try to work out a way of making that available to other people, which we did; we published them as a pack of cards, and they're now used by quite a lot of different people, I think.

-Brian Eno, interview with Charles Amirkhanian, KPFA-FM Berkeley, 2/1/80

An introduction to the Oblique Strategies can be found in the deck itself.This is how each of the first three decks labels and describes itself:

(card one)
OBLIQUE STRATEGIES
Over one hundred worthwhile dilemmas
by BRIAN ENO and PETER SCHMIDT
(signatures, if your copy is signed)
Printed January 1975 in an edition of 500
of which this is number (your number, circled)

(note: later versions note that the deck has been revised, and includethe date of publication - either 1978 for edition two, or 1979 for editionthree)

(card two)

These cards evolved from our separate observations on the principlesunderlying what we were doing. Sometimes they were recognized in retrospect(intellect catching up with intuition), sometimes they were identified asthey were happening, sometimes they were formulated.

Brian Eno Oblique Strategies List

They can be used as a pack (a set of possibilities being continuouslyreviewed in the mind) or by drawing a single card from the shuffled packwhen a dilemma occurs in a working situation. In this case,the card is trustedeven if its appropriateness is quite unclear. They are not final, as newideas will present themselves, and others will become self-evident.