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 Into the impossible. I went with an instant response, The Drum by The Impossibles (the Andrew Weatherall remix from 1991). Ernie agreed and mentioned his 7" copy of the original by Slapp Happy from 1974. Ernie also had Peter O'Toole singing in The Impossible Dream in the 1972 film Man Of La Mancha. Walter went with Medicine Head in 1973 with a mathematical impossibility, One Plus One Is One. Anonymous consulted a search engine and got Into The Impossible by Saint Profane and another Anonymous (or possibly the same one) suggested Impossible by The Charlatans. Khayem came up with Kylie's Impossible Princess and Bon Iver's cover of Talk Talk's I Believe. 

Spendid commented that there were several ways to take the suggestion Into the impossible and settled on Jessica Curry's So Let Us Melt, a computer game score that captures the 'impossible wonder of childhood... but comes closer to describing the aching loss of adulthood'. Indeed. Jessica's album is here- it's well worth your time. 

I did wonder, as a response to Spendid's comments, if I should be resisting the temptation to go with gut instinct when turning over the card, not just go for a song or artist name that the card suggests, but be a little less literal and a little more more lateral- surely what Eno and Schmidt intended.

Today's Oblique Saturday card is this...

Go to an extreme, move back to a more comfortable place

I slept on this. Extreme music is an interesting one. Artists that go to extremes are often admirable and worthy of our respect but they don't always make for fun listening experiences. I'm sure you can think of your own examples. 

I often think of Gnod as an extreme band- a Manchester collective with a rotating cast of players, born from a scene in the 00s around Islington Mill in Salford. They work with sound and light artists to create fully immersive experiences. They have played at a night called Gesantkunstwerk (German word, translates as 'whole arts work'). They cite Kurt Vonnegut as being as important to their music as any musical influences. So it goes. 

In 2017 they released an album called Just Say No To The Psycho Right- Wing Capitalist Fascist Industrial Death Machine (as statement even truer now than it was then- the psycho right- wing capitalist fascist industrial death machine is out of control in the USA right now). Gnod's music is loud, everything into the red, sludge powered psyche- rock. Maybe it's difficult to be extreme while making guitar music in the 2010s/ 20s but Gnod do it and do it well. 

Real Man

Early Husker Du- the Land Speed Record Husker Du- are extreme too, a live album from 1982 that flies through seventeen songs in half an hour, breakneck, amphetamine hardcore punk. By the time they hit 1984 and their double album concept opus Zen Arcade, they had an album that ended with the fourteen minute long jazz- hardcore punk instrumental Reoccurring Dreams. In between the two they opened 1984's New Day Rising with the title track, a coruscating wall of buzzsaw guitars,, breaking glass and thumping tinny drums, just three words repeated over and over...

New Day Rising

I then thought about going into the industrial techno area, the 'full on panel beaters from Prague' (quoth Andrew Weatherall) of the 90s, the sound of a metal bin being kicked, or Belgian hardcore and Dutch gabba, dance music taken to its extremities. Weatherall himself visited this area with Dave Hedger as Lords Of Afford, gratuitously hardcore techno as heard on this 1994 remix of Steve Bicknell...

Untitled (Lords Of Afford Mix)

Taking the word Extreme literally threw up Extreme Noise Terror, the extreme noise band from Ipswich. In 1992 they appeared on stage with The KLF (a duo who definitely took things to extremes) at the Brits, a noise metal version of 3am Eternal that ended with Bill Drummond firing a machine gun (firing blanks) at the assembled Brits audience. Then they dumped a dead sheep outside the venue. 

The KLF v Extreme Noise Terror 3am Eternal (Top Mix)

It occurred to me that extreme music can sometimes become a competition, a band racing to take their sound to the nth degree, the furthest point it can go. In 1989 Napalm Death recorded You Suffer, their speed metal/ grindcore reduced to a song that is 0.03 seconds long, released on 7". The lyrics apparently are, 'You suffer/ But why?'

The first half of the Oblique Strategy card is Go to an extreme... The second half is ...move back to a more comfortable place. I'm not sure I like the idea of music being comfortable- comfortable sounds dull and easy, like a sofa or a pair of elastic waist trousers. I've nothing against either, trousers and sofas are important parts of life, but I'm not sure art and music should be seen as such. 

There's a fairly well known phrase, 'art should disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed'. Banksy has used it but it's attributed to Cesar A. Cruz and a 1997 poem with the same title, a poem about the horrors humans inflict on each other- imperialism, war, capitalism, bigotry- and suddenly we're back at Gnod again. 

But comforting the disturbed is important, music as medicine and as a means of relief, as transportation. I know that music can do this- it's been incredibly important to me in the time since Isaac died in November 2021 and I've written before about a long Saturday afternoon, a week after his death, an afternoon where it seemed like it never got light and that it might go on forever. My physical symptoms were appalling, not least raging tinnitus. I hadn't been able to listen to any music since he died, nothing seemed to be what I wanted to hear. But I needed something that afternoon, if nothing else just to mark the passing of time and drown out the noise in my ears. I put on one of Richard Norris' Music For Healing EPs, probably the December 2021 release, two twenty minute ambient tracks and they did the trick, some aural balm, just enough to make an impact on me. I followed it with some ambient Americana by SUSS and somehow the music helped. A few weeks ago, to mark Martin Luther King Day, Richard released The Corn Is Coming, a four minute ambient track, made in an hour as part of the Mutual Defiance/ In Place Of War campaign. It's here. 

Feel free to make your own Oblique Saturday suggestions in the comment box. 

Elka

Gnod, a Salford based collective who channel guitars and FX pedals through fearsome amplification hit a political peak with their 2017 album Just Say No To The Psycho Right- Wing Capitalist Fascist Industrial Death Machine, an album where everything was into the red. Loud, confrontational, experimental and furious. Ten years ago their jams in a deserted mill in Salford saw them less political and more gnostic- repetition, drones, meditations and rituals and seemingly coming from some kind of urban occult direction. Elka, head music for the 2010s, is a trippy incantation, doused in reverb. Not exactly chilled or calming but its not caving your head in from the inside either. 

Elka

And if its viscous, sludgy, raw punk energy and battering ram drumming that you're craving you could always try their new five track release La Mort Du Sens, led by the hard and heavy Pink Champagne Blues. 

Random Selections From The Shelves

On Boxing Day night sitting in the room with all the records in it we played the game where someone pulls a record at random from the shelves and we play it. First to go was my daughter, who had already said she didn't like what my brother- in- law were listening to when she came in- 'it's not music, it's just noises' (Richard Norris' Abstractions Vol. 2). She was given the first go and pulled out St Etienne's 1994 12" single Pale Movie.

Pale Movie is off Tiger Bay, the sleeve with a tiger on both front and back. I photographed the tiger above at Port Lympne safari park in Kent a few years ago. I don't think keeping tigers in cages is a good idea (apart from the obvious conservation arguments) but the tigers at Lympne had a lot of room and seeing one close up and hearing it roar was pretty exciting. I digress. We played the single version of Pale Movie from the choice of four mixes on the single. Pale Movie is classic mid- 90s St Etienne, equal parts Eurobeat, Spanish guitar and Sarah singing lyrics about a boy and girl ('he is so dark and moody/she is the sunshine girl'). Pete, Bob and Sarah went to Nerja in Spain to shoot the video.



I went back to the 12" afterwards to re- listen to the other three mixes, all of which were worth giving a spin. Mark 'Spike' Stent, the man who mixed the song (and Hug My Soul from Tiger Bay as well), did the Stentorian Dub, a straightforward but effective clubby remix- plenty to enjoy in it with its bleepy synths and chunky drums.

Pale Movie (Stentorian Dub)

The longest remix was ten minutes from Kris Needs in his Secret Knowledge guise. It starts with an extended intro which builds into the first of several peaks. The Secret Knowledge Trouser Assassin mix goes pretty trancey with pummelling drums and Sarah's vocals dropped in along with the kitchen sink. Kris Needs was a master of this kind of thing in the mid 90s.

Pale Movie (Secret Knowledge Trouser Assassin Mix)

Finally a remix by Underworld (credited solely to Rick Smith), the Lemonentry Mix, one that clocks in at just over four minutes, very short for Underworld at the time. Rick worked on Tiger Bay too, mixing and programming Like A Motorway, Cool Kids Of Death and Urban Clearway. The Underworld remix of Cool Kids Of Death is one I'll come back to when I do a follow up to the Underworld remixes post from a week or two ago. The Lemonentry Mix is a slowed down, dubby affair, darker and moodier than the rest, with Sara's vocal intact.

Pale Movie (Lemonentry Mix)

Just to show how random the following selections from the shelves were my niece followed St Etienne with Gnod and a song from their Just Say No To The Psycho Right Wing Capitalist Fascist Industrial Death Machine album. We played the opening song, Bodies For Money, a glorious piece of feedback guitar led noise, every instrument recorded with the needle tipping into the red and Gnod raging against late period capitalism.



Mrs Swiss then pulled out a six track maxi- single The House Sound Of Chicago and as Gnod's noise dissolved we had Farley 'Jackmaster' Funk's 1986 song Love Can't Turn Around, featuring the sublime vocals of Daryl Pandy, a song that was the first US house track to hit the UK charts. It still sounds huge, crashing pianos, 808s and 303s. Magical.

Love Can't Turn Around

Fun for all the family as I'm sure you can see.

Monday's Long Song

Gnod are an ever increasing and decreasing collective who started life based in Islington Mill in Salford and have been unleashing records on the world since 2007. They make long songs. Noisy, experimental, guitar-based songs with drones, long build ups and slow explosions, unsettling and psychedelic, vocals covered in reverb and static. In 2017 they made an album called Just Say No To The Psycho Right- Wing Capitalist Fascist Industrial Death Machine, an album dealing with 'the rampant dehumanisation and destruction of personhood under Western capitalism'. Previously, in 2013, they released Chaudelande and this seventeen minute space rock extravaganza is a wake up call to welcome you to Monday morning. There's a heatwave coming this week- Gnod are already burning.

The Vertical Dead

On My Gnod

I don't know what they've been drinking in Salford recently but there's some strange things brewing across the Irwell. Drew tipped me off to Gnod a little while back. This song is one of the shorter ones of their new lp Chaudelande, being a mere eight minutes long. Starting with some finger cymbals and chanting, just to disconcert you a little, it then settles into a crunching groove with thumping drums and a cranked up guitar. Occasionally some extremely distorted, crackly vocals appear and then disappear. Towards the end they raise it up a notch, shift gear and proceed towards the finale. The wah-wah pedal takes a battering. I'm picturing Salfordian noise-monks playing at a Julian Cope gig somewhere remote, with an audience locked in a barn, transfixed by the pummeling the instruments are getting. Although the truth may be a little crustier. See for yourself. And then shell out for the album.

Man On The Wire