Oblique Saturdays

A series for Saturdays in 2026 inspired by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's set of cards, Oblique Strategies (Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas). Eno and Schmidt created them to be used to unblock creative impasses and approach problems from unexpected angles. Each week I'll turn over an Oblique Strategy card and post a song or songs inspired by the suggestion. 

Last week's card said 'Disconnect from desire'.

Disconnection from desire came via Gala, The Beastie Boys and Scritti Politti. From the Bagging Area readership pool, Ernie was in first with Alessandro Moreschi, L. Braynstemmmmm suggested Kraftwerk's Computer Love, Rol offered Claudie Frish- Mentrop and Expendables' Man With No Desire and Jase gave us Sinead and I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got. Chris also offered Sinead's second album and suggested the Apple Brightness Mix of I Am Stretched On Your Grave which has a sample of How Soon Is Now buried within it.  

This week's card said this- Breathe more deeply.

Good advice. Useful for dealing with stress, increasing mood and focus. 

In the studio breathing more deeply could be interpreted as an instruction to let the music breathe, to slow it down, leave more space between the notes, focus on what you're not playing as much as what you are. It makes me think of Basic Channel, the Berlin techno duo who made dub- techno so minimal, so stripped down that it almost became something not music- just pure sound, a breathing exercise. 

This one is fifteen minutes long and from 1994. The dull thud of a muffled kick drum, a ball of barely there static, a repeating synth sound. Inhale exhale.  

Quadrant Dub I

I also thought of this from Deanne Day, a mid- 90s pseudonym used by Andrew Weatherall and David Harrow on three 12" singles. D and A. Andrew had dropped out of view a little post- Sabres, a choice to shun from the bright lights and the greasy pole. Blood Sugar was a deep house/ dub techno night he put on and Deanne Day fits in very well with that sound- kick drum, hiss of hi hat, lots of space, that vocal sample, 'I can hardly breathe', and a bassline to groove to. Another nearly fifteen minute long track.

Hardly Breathe

Inhale exhale. Calm in repetition. 

Later on the vocal becomes, 'When you stand there/ When you stand naked/ Looking at you'. Less calming perhaps. 

The synths swirl, the drums drop out, the bass bumps away, the snare rattles. A few minutes later (and nothing happens in a rush in Hardly Breathe, everything plays out for bars, unfolds in its own time) a long two note chord moves in. 

Andrew had a thing when making records around this time, as Deanne Day or Blood Sugar. There could only be four elements going on at once. If you wanted to add a new sound, you had to remove one. It kept it minimal and focused. Restrictions as a creative tool- which sounds like an Oblique Strategy. 

Feel free to make your own Breathe more deeply responses into the comments box. 

Basic Stuff

More dub techno, this time of the 1990s variety and courtesy of the masters of the form Basic Channel. The Berlin duo were legendarily obsessive about production, mastering and sound quality and equally committed to minimalism in terms of sound and design. This one is from a  12" released in 1993 titled Q1.1, four tracks labelled Q1.1/I to IIII. This is the third, deep and sleek and cutting straight to the heart of things. 

Q1.1/III is here.

Basic Reshape

The flipside to sunshine drenched Italian Balearica is austere, minimal dub- techno from German duo Basic Channel. In 1995 Basic Channel (Moritz von Oswald and Mark Ernestus) put out a CD called BCD which compiled the series of 12" singles they'd released during the two previous years, a series of pioneering deep cuts. On the album was this- a six minute glide- by of bass, FX, insistent rhythm and heavy sounds- titled Remake (Basic Reshape). 

Remake (Basic Reshape)

Remake (Basic Reshape) originally saw the light of dawn under the name e2e4 Basic Reshape, a remix of Throw by Paperclip People (Carl Craig's brilliant dub- techno guise). Basic Channel remade Craig's track, which sampled Manuel Gottsching's minimalistic, hour long E2- E4 (the basis of yesterday's post, 1989's Sueño Latino). In doing so they pushed pushing Gottsching's 1984 album into new directions. Remake is a heavy duty, slow motion, bass led groove, a long way from the original and the '89 hit that sampled it. The melody has been filtered out and replaced with utterly absorbing layers of sounds. Dance music (for want of a better term) had a real sense of forward trajectory between '89 and '95, a constantly forward thinking form, the music of the future in the here and now. This still sounds futuristic. 

Basic

The timer keeps edging upwards this week- after yesterday's thirteen minutes plus existential dub disco from AMOR today I give you twenty minutes of dub techno heaven from Berlin. Released on Basic Channel's own label in 1994 Quadrant Dub I and II together are a/the definitive piece of mid 90s Berlin machine music, split over two sides of a 12" single, one mix fifteen minutes long and the other twenty. This record has the ability to suspend time. And space. It is twenty three years old and still sounds like it is the future.

Quadrant Dub II

Yes Partial

Sifting through my cds the other night I came across this- Rhythm And Sound. I don't know why it caught my attention because the cardboard digi-sleeve is black and grey, with grey text, not remotely eye-catching. I'm glad it did though because I'd forgotten how good it is. Rhythm And Sound is the name of the dub/reggae output of Berlin's Basic Channel, who as Basic Channel defined minimal German dub-techno in the 1990s with a series of 12" records. The Rhythm And Sound reggae and dub oriented stuff was compiled on one cd, released in 2001 with a new track as opener- No Partial. This is high quality modern dub- deep, dark, digital dub, a little unsettling, with plenty of hiss and massive bass. Not much point listening to this on that little cd player or docking bay you keep in the kitchen for doing the washing up to- this needs to be played on the big stereo in the front room, or on headphones where it might keep you awake for a while.

No Partial