8Sided Blog

the scene celebrates itself

Brian Eno on the Oblique Strategies, 1978

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A terrific conversation with Brian Eno from 1978 was just republished online by Interview magazine. He speaks quite a bit about the Oblique Strategies deck and its uses:

The Oblique Strategy was an attempt to make a set that was slightly more specific, tailored to a more particular situation than the I Ching, which is tailored to cosmic situations, though I suppose that with sufficient skill one could use the I Ching. And of course, all of those oracles work in the same way. You can either believe that they carry intrinsic wisdom of some kind, or else you can believe that they work on a purely behavioral level, simply adjusting your perception at a point, or suggesting a different perception. Or you can believe a blend of both.



I always pick at random. Other people sort through them, but I never use them unless I come to a point where a piece isn’t getting anywhere and needs help. When I work there are two distinct phases: the phase of pushing the work along, getting something to happen, where all the input comes from me, and phase two, where things start to combine in a way that wasn’t expected or predicted by what I supplied. Once phase two begins everything is okay, because then the work starts to dictate its own terms. It starts to get an identity which demands certain future moves. But during the first phase you often find that you come to a full stop. You don’t know what to supply. And it’s at that stage that I will pull one of the cards out.



Later on you might be faced with a number of options that seem equally desirable—again I might pull one out rather than try all the options. I’ve used them on nearly every record I’ve made.



{David Bowie and I} used Oblique Strategies quite a lot. On one of the pieces {on Heroes}—”Sense of Doubt“—we both pulled an Oblique Strategy at the beginning and kept them to ourselves. It was like a game. We took turns working on it; he’d do one overdub and I’d do the next, and he’d do the next. The idea was that each was to observe his Oblique Strategy as closely as he could. And as it turned out they were entirely opposed to one another. Effectively mine said, “Try to make everything as similar as possible,” which in effect is trying to create a homogenous line, and his said “Emphasize differences,” so whereas I was trying to smooth it out and make it into one continuum he was trying do to the opposite.



Read the full interview HERE.

Musik Von Harmonia

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The New Yorker:

The Germans invented electronic dance music, just as surely as German engineers, working between the wars, had invented magnetic tape. And, at the same time, groups like Tangerine Dream, Popol Vuh, Cluster, and Neu! were playing songs that seeped much more softly into the atmosphere. It took Brian Eno to coin the phrase “ambient music,” but it’s worth remembering that he did so after playing with German musicians, and after collaborating with David Bowie on “Low”—an album (the first in Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy) that might be heard as an homage to Krautrock and, at its worst, becomes Krautrock pastiche.



Harmonia was a sort of supergroup, composed of Hans-Joachim Roedelius, Dieter Moebius, and Michael Rother, a guitarist who had played in Neu! and an early incarnation of Kraftwerk. The trio made two albums: “Musik von Harmonia,” in 1974, and “Deluxe,” in 1975. They played to audiences that were indifferent or hostile. “Harmonia was completely ignored or hated,” Rother told me, over Skype, recently. “Ignored would have been the better thing. People did not understand it, did not want our music.”



The idea, Rother told me, was to scrape clean the musical palate. “By that time,” he said, in lightly accented English, “I had left behind the idea of being a guitar hero, of trying to impress people by playing fast melodies. So I went back to one note. One guitar string. It was quite a primitive music, really.” What this meant, in practice, is that Rother—who’d grown up covering Cream, the Stones, and the Beatles—had subtracted the blues (if not the funk) from his playing. Eventually, he’d simplified chord progressions, or removed them entirely, playing single-note runs against a tight matrix set up by his partner in Neu! and Kraftwerk, the drummer Klaus Dinger. The resulting songs, most of them instrumental, could sound like a stream or a flood; either way, the effect was one of constant, cleansing forward motion.



Yes, indeed, let’s listen to Harmonia today.
Here’s their music on Apple Music
and Spotify
and YouTube.

Hitting The Links

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Italian Photographer Documents The Ruins Of Former Nightclubs Across Italy

“Discotheques, the symbol of ’80s and ’90s hedonism, were fake marble temples adorned with Greek statues made of gypsum, futuristic spaces of gigantic size, large enough to contain the dreams of success, money, fun of thousands people. And then the dreams are gone, people disappeared and nightclubs became abandoned wrecks, cement whales laid on large empty squares, places inhabited by echo and melancholy.”



Billy Name’s Enigmatic Images Of Warhol’s Silver Factory And The Velvet Underground

Billy {Name} was Warhol’s brief lover, long-term friend and celebrated archivist, documenting the glamourous and surreal goings on of the Silver Factory, which he was commissioned to decorate by the artist in 1964. This decor took the form of coating the East 47th Street space almost entirely in silver foil or silver spray paint – hence its name – and creating a futuristic-looking playground for talents like The Velvet Underground and Edie Sedgwick.



How Punk And Reggae Fought Back Against Racism In The ’70s

Putting black and white bands on stage together was a political statement in itself. We didn’t go on stage shouting “smash the National Front” and all that sloganeering, but we did want to extend the argument and talk about Zimbabwe, South Africa and apartheid, Northern Ireland, sexism and homophobia. We wanted to go, “Look, the National Front is not just against black people, they’re against all of this as well.”



How Brian Eno Created A Quiet Revolution In Music

A proper “furniture music” had to wait until the invention of recorded sound. This made possible a new form of listening, which Eno’s Music for Airports embodies to perfection. Recorded music is infinitely repeatable, and subject to the listeners’ will. We can ignore it or pay attention, as we choose. Ambient music celebrates this special form of listening like no other genre. As Brian Eno said: “I wanted to make something you can slip in and out of.”



HC-TT Human Controlled Tape Transport

The HC-TT Human Controlled Tape Transport is a compact cassette manipulation device that lets you play a cassette tape with your hand, similar to how you scratch a vinyl record. It’s like the love child of turntablism and musique concrète, letting you ‘scratch’ cassette audio recordings and more.

Hitting The Links

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Tom Wilson, Record Producer For The Velvet Underground and Bob Dylan

As monumental as were those Dylan and Simon & Garfunkel albums {he produced}, Wilson’s most challenging work in the recording booth came after Columbia, when he became a staff producer at MGM/Verve in 1966 and helmed the debut albums by both Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention and the Velvet Underground within a two-month period (March-May 1966). You couldn’t get too weird for Wilson, who released cosmic freejazz philosopher Sun Ra’s first album in 1956. Jazz By Sun Ra came out on Transition, the label Wilson started in 1955, right after he graduated from Harvard with a degree in economics.



Vintage Drum Kits From The 1920s And 1930s

I am fascinated by the early drum kits: they were very creative assemblages that generally included Chinese tack head tom toms, wood blocks, China-type cymbals, the “low boys” or “sock cymbals” that preceded the modern hi-hat. And of course the big bass drums and snare drums on their spindly little stands. To me these first American forays into multi-percussion setups are things of sculptural beauty.



Brian Eno And Peter Schmidt’s ‘Oblique Strategies,’ The Original Handwritten Cards

The Oblique Strategies cards were idea-generating tools and tactics designed to break routine thinking patterns. While born of a studio context, Oblique Strategies translated equally well to the music studio. For Eno, the instructions provided an antidote in high-pressure situations in which impulse might lead one to default quickly to a proven solution rather than continue to explore untested possibilities: “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 other 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.”



The Neuroscience Of Musical Perception, Bass Guitars And Drake

How humans perceive music is, of course, far more complicated than simply tuning in to tempo. Music draws up — and draws from — memories, emotions and pleasure and reward activity in the brain. Other acoustic qualities like melody, harmony and timbre also play important roles. And our conscious ability to apply symbolic meaning to sounds, lyrics and song — and to recognize when listening to music that what we’re listening to is supposed to be music — also certainly influences human musical perception.



Secrets to Long Haul Creativity

Being creative over a career involves a whole subset of nearly invisible skills, a great many of which conflict with most people’s general ideas about what it means to be creative. What’s more, being creative is different than the business of being creative, and most people who learn how to be good at the first, are often really terrible at the second. Finally, emotionally, creativity just takes a toll. Decade after decade, that toll adds up. So here are eight of my favorite lessons on the hard fight of long-haul creativity. A few are my own. Most are things I learned from others. All have managed to keep me saner along the way.