Oblique Strategies

Pernahkah anda merasakan ide-ide tidak mengalir lancar seperti biasanya? Pernahkah anda dihadapkan pada dilema saat berkreasi? Keadaan ini mungkin muncul hanya saat anda berada dalam tekanan dan rasa panik. Sambil menatap hampa berharap inspirasi akan datang seketika.

Brian Eno dan Peter Schmidt merilis satu set kartu yang berisi frasa atau kalimat inspiratif. Tidak ada cara yang baku untuk menggunakan kartu tersebut. Anda cukup mengambil salah satu kartu dan ikuti petunjuk yang tertulis.

Berikut penjelasan Brian Eno tentang Oblique Strategies:

“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

THE WORDINGS

• Abandon normal instruments
• Accept advice
• Accretion
• A line has two sides
• Allow an easement (an easement is the abandonment of a stricture)
• Are there sections? Consider transitions
• Ask people to work against their better judgement
• Ask your body
• Assemble some of the instruments in a group and treat the group
• Balance the consistency principle with the inconsistency principle
• Be dirty
• Breathe more deeply
• Bridges -build -burn
• Cascades
• Change instrument roles
• Change nothing and continue with immaculate consistency
• Children’s voices -speaking -singing
• Cluster analysis
• Consider different fading systems
• Consult other sources -promising -unpromising
• Convert a melodic element into a rhythmic element
• Courage!
• Cut a vital connection
• Decorate, decorate
• Define an area as ‘safe’ and use it as an anchor
• Destroy -nothing -the most important thing
• Discard an axiom
• Disconnect from desire
• Discover the recipes you are using and abandon them
• Distorting time
• Do nothing for as long as possible
• Don’t be afraid of things because they’re easy to do
• Don’t be frightened of cliches
• Don’t be frightened to display your talents
• Don’t break the silence
• Don’t stress one thing more than another
• Do something boring
• Do the washing up
• Do the words need changing?
• Do we need holes?
• Emphasise differences
• Emphasise repetitions
• Emphasise the flaws
• Faced with a choice, do both (given by Dieter Rot)
• Feedback recordings into an acoustic situation
• Fill every beat with something
• Get your neck massaged
• Ghost echoes
• Give the game away
• Give way to your worst impulse
• Go slowly all the way round the outside
• Honor thy error as a hidden intention
• How would you have done it?
• Humanise something free of error
• Imagine the music as a moving chain or caterpillar
• Imagine the music as a set of disconnected events
• Infinitesimal gradations
• Intentions -credibility of -nobility of -humility of
• Into the impossible
• Is it finished?
• Is there something missing?
• Is the tuning appropriate?
• Just carry on
• Left channel, right channel, centre channel
• Listen in total darkness, or in a very large room, very quietly
• Listen to the quiet voice
• Look at a very small object, look at its centre
• Look at the order in which you do things
• Look closely at the most embarrassing details and amplify them
• Lowest common denominator check -single beat -single note -single riff
• Make a blank valuable by putting it in an exquisite frame
• Make an exhaustive list of everything you might do and do the last thing on the list
• Make a sudden, destructive unpredictable action; incorporate
• Mechanicalise something idiosyncratic
• Mute and continue
• Only one element of each kind
• (Organic) machinery
• Overtly resist change
• Put in earplugs
• Remember .those quiet evenings
• Remove ambiguities and convert to specifics
• Remove specifics and convert to ambiguities
• Repetition is a form of change
• Reverse
• Short circuit
• Shut the door and listen from outside
• Simple subtraction
• Spectrum analysis
• Take a break
• Take away the elements in order of apparent non-importance
• Tape your mouth (given by Ritva Saarikko)
• The inconsistency principle
• The tape is now the music
• Think of the radio
• Tidy up
• Trust in the you of now
• Turn it upside down
• Twist the spine
• Use an old idea
• Use an unacceptable colour
• Use fewer notes
• Use filters
• Use ‘unqualified’ people
• Water
• What are you really thinking about just now? Incorporate
• What is the reality of the situation?
• What mistakes did you make last time?
• What would your closest friend do?
• What wouldn’t you do?
• Work at a different speed
• You are an engineer
• You can only make one dot at a time
• You don’t have to be ashamed of using your own ideas