Wednesday 29 December 2010

Oblique Strategies? State the problem in words as clearly as possible

I was listening to the wonderful 6 Music this morning and the excellent Marc Riley was on at entirely the wrong time of day, but chatting about Brian Eno and about Oblique Strategies. Whenever I get really stuck for ideas I sometimes access the link below. The oblique strategy cards were devised and written in the mid seventies, in collaboration between musician Brian Eno and painter Peter Schmidt. They are so obliquely written that the suggestions and phrases are pretty easy to apply to musical composition and visual art too.
It is essentially a set of cards with instructions that you must follow in the event of creative blockage, and the link is a virtual set of the cards. Anyway as discussed on the radio David Bowie used it on his Berlin trilogy when working with Eno so it must work to an extent? You can probably buy a set of cards somewhere...Amazon probably.



http://music.hyperreal.org/artists/brian_eno/oblique/oblique.html

3 comments:

Sector 4 said...

I know for a fact a guy from China Crisis uses these too.

STEVE WILKIN said...

Ha Ha was he at the book fair last year?

Corby Tindersticks said...

You can buy them as an iPhone app now!