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. 

Twenty Three

Back in November last year, a week or two before Isaac died, I started reading a book about The KLF by John Higgs titled 'The KLF: Chaos, Magic and the Band Who Burned A Million Pounds'. It is not a conventional band biography- Higgs supplies two different endings (read both, decide which one you prefer) and as someone somewhere quipped, at times the book is more a history of Discordianism with appearances by The KLF as much as the story of Bill Drummond, Jimmy Cauty and their adventures in the music industry. 

Discordianism is/ was one of the foundation stones of Drummond and Cauty's world, the modern day religion of chaos and irreverence dreamed up by Greg Hill and Kerry Wendall Thornley in 1963. Higgs brings in much more as well and branches off all over the place- Situationism, Dr Who, punk, rave, Carl Jung and Dada all show up. It's difficult to tell at times, and I think this is one of Higgs' key points, whether Drummond and Cauty know what they are doing and whether they are in control of what they unleash or whether the magical forces of Discordia and the Illuminati have taken over completely. I've always found it difficult to tell whether Drummond and Cauty are deadly serious or playing with it. Either way, it leads them to The Brits in February 1992 where they machine gunned the audience while Extreme Noise Terror thrashed away behind them, to having to be talked out of dumping a dead sheep on the steps of the venue and then to the Isle of Jura where they burned a million quid. Something they've been unable to explain (to themselves or others) ever since. 

The KLF v Extreme Noise Terror 3 A.M. Eternal (Top Mix)

When Isaac got taken into hospital with Covid I was a few chapters in. I didn't pick the book up for a while after all of that but at some point went back to it and almost immediately found myself in the chapter on Discordianism and specifically the number twenty three. Discordianism a parody religion. Probably. One of it's central practices is/ was Operation Mindfuck, an attempt to undermine all conspiracy theories by publicly attributing major events (wars, assassinations etc) to the Illuminati, thereby demonstrating how ridiculous conspiracy theories are- while also contributing to paranoia and creating more conspiracy theories. 

For Discordians the number twenty three is everything, the secret behind it all. The number five is also important because two and three make five and two and three are twenty three. William Burroughs cited the so called 23 Enigma to Robert Anton Wilson in an interview (Wilson wrote the Illuminatus! Trilogy). Drummond and Cauty took their name The JAMMs from the books and twenty three is littered through The Justified Ancients Of Mu Mu and The KLF's works. Drummond and Cauty burned the money on the twenty third of August and then agreed to not discuss it for twenty three years. This is where you suspect they're playing with it- except burning a million pounds is not playing. 

In a normal frame of mind all of this would have been amusing and interesting but in my raw and grief stricken state it fully freaked me out. Isaac was twenty three when he died and his birthday is on the twenty third of November. One of his birthday presents we'd given to him a week earlier, on the twenty third, was a United shirt with his name on the back and the number twenty three beneath it. The shirt was already with him, in his coffin. I put the book down and the day after- I don't remember exactly when this was but I think it was some time in December. The day after I picked the book up and read the chapter again and it disturbed me again. Moreso when I looked at my phone to see what time it was and it was, of course, 23.23pm. It disturbed me for some time afterwards- but then I was already very disturbed and it didn't take much to tip me over. There were a couple of other Isaac numerological coincidences around the same time which added to it all. 

Robert Anton Wilson, the writer and philosopher recognised in Discordianism as a saint, has since said that the mystery around the number twenty three is self- fulfilling, proof that the mind can find meaning or truth in anything. 'When you start looking for something, you tend to find it' he said, 'it is all selective perception'. I'm sure he's right. 

This is the twenty third record in my record collection. A Certain Ratio in 1990, remixed by Bernard Sumner. 

Won't Stop Loving You