The importance of being oblique

I liked what Nick Harmer, bassist for Death Cab for Cutie, said in a phone interview recently when I asked him why the band was so into Brian Eno.

“I think Chris mentioned we were listening to Brian Eno one time,” Harmer said with a sigh, “and that’s gone to ‘We’re totally hyped on Eno, and we really want to make an Eno record!’”

He was puzzled by the media’s fixation on this seemingly random remark but conceded that “We’ve just been inspired by Eno, the creative choices he makes in the studio, and we like to get into that mindset. But we never really sat down and said, ‘Okay, what would Brian Eno do?’”

Just to beat a dead horse, I kidded him: “So for your next album, you’ll be using Oblique Strategies to record?”

But it turns out doing what Eno would do is a viable option for many musicians. Ever since the bald Svengali-like producer devised a deck of playing cards with German artist Peter Schmidt called “Oblique Strategies” in 1975, scores of musicians have tried using it for recording. (Most famously, David Bowie during the “Heroes” and “Low” recordings, Talking Heads during “Remain in Light,” not to mention R.E.M., Coldplay, MGMT, etc.) The idea was to select the top card from a shuffled deck and apply its statement (“Go to an extreme, come partway back,” for example) to the recording at hand. At the very least, the deck of cards gave musicians something to toss across the room into a hat whenever inspiration had fled them.

Oblique Strategies  decorated by artist Schmidt in the original decks, though now impossible to find except on geeky Eno websites or eBay  contains a series of 52 statements or questions meant to jog the musician out of his musical rut. Zen statements like “What is missing?” are arrived at randomly; how to apply the wisdom to recording is up to the artist.

More importantly for this digital age, Oblique Strategies now has a software version you can download for free (search for Oblique Strategies 1.2, Curved Space Software, 1979). You can consult it on your desktop or laptop computer, whenever you’re stuck on something. Anything. No, seriously.

Oblique Strategies for living? Why not. We cling to all kinds of strange beliefs. People consult the Magic Eight Ball to decide on everything from what to wear to when to get married. Why not a series of random, off-kilter commands to get you up and running?

Install the Oblique Strategies (there’s both Mac and PC versions) and the commands start to fade onto the screen in Zen-like purple rectangles. You can take the first message, or skip ahead to the next question/statement until you find your bliss.

My first pass was a little more oblique than I was prepared for. “Which parts can be grouped?” read the purple rectangle. I wasn’t sure if this meant organizing my crazy, misaligned cluster of desktop folders or perhaps realigning my own body parts.

“Ask your body” was the next statement. Okay. That’s clearer. I did ask my body what to do with this bit of information. I noticed the tone of the statements had begun to sound a bit snippy and dictatorial, but it probably all depends on your mood when reading them.

The next statement gave me even less guidance: “The inconsistency principle.”

Huh?

Perhaps this would make more sense in a recording studio, where drum rolls or vocal takes never quite sound the same each time, and one should learn to embrace the unpredictability factor.

“Cut a vital connection” came up next. This could refer to unfriending a Facebook acquaintance, or perhaps rethinking one’s way of doing something. I decided to dump some Facebook friends.

“Try faking it” was my next oblique command. I was beginning to think the Magic Eight Ball would have been more helpful. Sometimes I do feel like I’m faking 70-80 percent of my adult life. Then again, as Woody Allen likes to say, “80 percent of life is just showing up.” So perhaps the Oblique Strategies was onto something here.

“Would anyone want it?” was my next message. This reminded me of something James Brown used to ask his own reflection in the mirror each morning: “Would people pay to see you?” Sometimes we have to think about what value our little creations have in the actual marketplace.

The next one threw me.

“Go outside. Shut the door.”

At this point, I was ready to take a little break from my desk. I walked around, stretched, did some deep-breathing exercises, and thought about my strategy in conducting this experiment. Then it occurred to me: You’re only supposed to receive one Oblique Strategy per day! Or at the most, one per task. Here I was, firing them up like celebrity tweets, one after the other. I was probably experiencing Oblique Strategy overload. You can only glimpse so much of the creative cosmos in one session, after all. No wonder Eno lost all of his hair.

I returned to the desk, determined to receive a few more messages that day.

“Destroy nothing; destroy the most important thing.” This one I could do little with, since I couldn’t decide if the two things were one and the same. 

“In total darkness, or in a very large room, very quietly.” That wasn’t even a sentence. I thought about contemplating the wisdom of my experiment in a place very far away from my newsroom desk  perhaps in a space pod like the one Dave floats in during 2001: A Space Odyssey.

“What mistakes did you make last time?” came next. Ah, let me count the ways. Perhaps I should have written down a task or a goal before I committed to this Oblique Strategies thing. Now it felt like I was hooked, like a determined lola pulling slot machines in Macau. I kept hitting “Command+N” to get the next advice.

“Display your talent,” it said. I have a talent for finishing my column in the office, preferably at 1,000 words or less, and the next message (“When is it for?”) reminded me why I was there to begin with. But in case I misunderstood the message, my final Oblique Strategy spelled it out in a peaceful, forgiving font against a calm field of purple:

“Just carry on.”