What are they? The most famous of Brian Eno's dadaist mind games with music production. The original Oblique Strategies (Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas), was a set of cards created by Eno and his painter friend Peter Schmidt, and published as a signed limited edition in 1975. On each card is printed an (often quite abstract) instruction, which is invoked when an artist, producer or band has reached some form of creative impasse and requires external disruptive influence to suggest new ideas.
Oblique Strategies is an aid to creative thinking created by Peter S. Robin Petterd and also incorporates text from the Oblique Strategies cards by Brian Eno/Peter Schmidt. A D V E R T I S E M E N T. Oblique Strategies is a concept developed by Brian Eno and Peter Schimdt to help artists overcome creative block through lateral thinking. The latest issue of anvil journal is out today and themed on pioneer ministry.
Who uses them? Oblique Strategies is most associated with bands Eno famously produced during his mid to late-70s creative highpoint, including Talking Heads, Berlin trilogy-era Bowie and Devo. Nuendo 2 mac free download. More recently, Coldplay used Oblique Strategies when working with Eno on Viva La Vida, and Phoenix – rather than shelling out for Eno himself – bought a deck to use while recording Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix.
How do they work? The actual instructions? Try getting your heads around these: 'Discard an axiom'; 'Honor thy error as a hidden intention'; 'Not building a wall, but making a brick'; 'What are the sections sections of?'; 'Always first steps'; 'Idiot glee', or indeed, 'Short-circuit principle – a man eating peas in the belief that they will improve virility shovels them straight into his lap.'
Where do they come from? Eno claims that he and Schmidt devised almost identical Oblique Strategy systems, at the same time and using almost exactly the same words, but completely independently of each other. The power of the synchronicity was enough to convince them to make the messages available to other artists. Despite Schmidt's death in 1980, Eno has continued to revise the Strategies, and the fifth edition of the cards was published this year, along with the inevitable iPhone app.
Why are they classic? Depends who you ask. U2 didn't use them, but the Edge applied the cards' rationale of 'seeing limitations as some kind of a strength and a governing influence over what you do' to their work with Eno. David Byrne thinks that 'Brian's cards are funny and sometimes useful', but the rest of Talking Heads resented Eno's input.
Edgeview 2 2.476. What's the best ever Oblique Strategies song? Well, it's not going to be anything by Coldplay (did Eno invent a deck just for them with instructions like 'Make everything more pretty' or 'Be a bit sad'?). So let's go for Eno's own St Elmo's Fire.
Five facts and things
The blurb accompanying the 2001 edition says: '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. They are not final, as new ideas will present themselves, and others will become self-evident.'
Don't get Devo started on Oblique Strategies. 'Devo being the smartass intellectuals that we were, we thought the Oblique Strategies were pretty wanky,' said group leader Gerry Casale. 'They were too Zen for us. We thought that precious, pseudo-mystical, elliptical stuff was too groovy. We were into brute, nasty realism and industrial-strength sounds and beats. We didn't want pretty. Brian was trying to add beauty to our music.'
Oblique Strategies isn't just handy for making Coldplay sound a bit like Queen or whatever, they can also be applied to cringeworthy creative branding and cooking. Winusb maker 2.0.
When working with Coldplay, Eno would give each member of the band a random card and ask them to interpret its instruction musically as the band jammed, without letting the other members know what their card says. 'Of course, the chances of you getting a great piece of music are quite remote,' Eno acknowledges. 'But the chances of you getting a seed for something are quite strong. You hear a voice singing a single note over a drumbeat and you think .. 'Ooh, it's not quite the right drumbeat or quite the right note, but there's something good about it.'
The new iPhone app has made Oblique Strategies available to the masses for the first time. Previously, intrigued Eno-ites would have to watch eBay like a hawk for a deck to become available (the editions were usually released in small presses of 500 to 1000 and no two decks were the same). For a while, a small cult of Eno followers started up their own internet-based Acute Strategies system, where anyone could submit their own strategies, providing they followed lots of geeky rules about avoiding jargon and inside jokes and urging a familiarity with the I Ching and other oracular sources.
Oblique Strategies (subtitled Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas) is a card-based method for promoting creativity jointly created by Brian Eno and 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.
Diary of a teenage girl download. 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] Download revit 2019 for mac.
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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:
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]
Oblique Strategies WidgetEditions and variations[edit]![]()
See also[edit]References[edit]
External links[edit]Brian Eno Cards Oblique Strategies
Oblique Strategies Pdf
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