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 Oblique Strategy suggestion was A very small object. It's centre.

I went all atomic with Quando Quango and Mark Kamins, Juan Moreno, and Massive Attack, all loosely tied together by Carlo Rovelli and quantum physics. Out in the Bagging Area community there were the usual array of fantastic suggestions- Newcleus from Michel Houellebecq's Petit Mort, Suzanne Vega from Trail Of Bread, They Might Be Giants from Rol, Chapterhouse and Badly Drawn Boy from Al G, Soft Cell from Chris, The Incredible String Band from Ernie and sneaking in at the end Mrs G with Tinie Tempah with a tribute to stars and teenagers. 

Here's Chapterhouse's very small object, swirling shoegaze from 1991.

Pearl

This week's card says this- Change instrument roles

The Roland TB- 303 is a bassline synthesiser, produced by the Roland Corporation in 1981 and designed to replace the bass guitar and to accompany the 808 drum machine. It was considered a commercial failure and discontinued in 1984. 

Over in Chicago a group called Phuture had a 303 and had been seeing what they could do with it, what the instruction manual didn't tell them. By abusing the machine they discovered they could do much more than make a synthesised bassline- they could change the sound completely, making a squelchy, liquid, otherworldly sound that became the foundation stone of what a couple of years later became known as acid house. 

Acid Trax

Phuture were DJ Pierre, Spanky and Herbert Jackson. Marshall Jefferson helped out with the production of  Acid Trax and in getting it released. Phuture had in turn built on the house sound that DJ Ron Hardy had been playing at Chicago's warehouse parties, the mayhem of those parties Hardy DJed at and the thump of the rhythm and the effect it had on the crowd. The acid squelch took it up to another level. When it was released in 1987 it made its way to the UK, to London, Manchester and Nottingham. That squelch, that distinctive, futuristic, face melting sound that warps its way through Acid Trax is what happens when someone changes instrument roles. And kick starts a revolution. 

Nashville's Luke Schneider has taken an instrument usually associated with country and western and the Grand Ole Opry, the pedal steel guitar, added some FX and changed the pedal steel's role completely- in Luke's hands the pedal steel is an ambient instrument, layers of drones and ringing sounds, an enveloping soundscape. This is from 2020's Altar Of Harmony, as good a place to start as any. 

Mundi Tuum Est

Feel free to drop your own responses to Change instrument roles into the comments box. 

Monday's Long Song

More shoegaze/ ambient techno crossover music for Monday, this one possibly the pinnacle of this run of posts (previous posts have featured Curve remixed by Future Sound Of London, Slowdive remixed by Reload and Spooky's remix of Lush). In 1991 shoegazers Chapterhouse released their debut album Whirlpool. The band were from Reading, the hotbed of shoegaze in the early 90s, but they'd been gigging since 1987 and had played alongside Spacemen 3- they also followed Nirvana on stage at the Reading Festival in 1991. 

In 1993 Chapterhouse released the follow up, Blood Music. Early editions of the album came with a second disc of remixes by Global Communications titled Pentamerous Metamorphosis. Chapterhouse had handed over the entire album to Mark Pritchard and Tom Middleton, rising stars of ambient/ ambient techno. Global Communications constructed a five piece album, an electronic ambient trip that stands among the best work of the period and the scene, five tracks named Alpha Phase, Beta Phase, Gamma Phase, Delta Phase and Epsilon Phase, each ten or more minutes long. There are occasional sounds or samples that come from Chapterhouse's original recordings, a guitar part here and there say, but largely Mark and Tom constructed something entirely new using something else as a starting point. 

It was re- released in 1998 with a litigious sample from Star Wars removed- George Lucas may have made nine films about a group of freedom fighters rebelling against an evil empire but he's a bit touchy about single lines of dialogue being used by obscure ambient artists. The offending line was C- 3PO saying, 'I am fluent in over six million forms of communication'. Global Communications had a side project named Jedi Knights and were feeling the Lucasfilm heat a little by 1998. 

This is Alpha Phase, sixteen minutes of progressive futurism- long synth chords, twinkles, echoes, percussion, metallic clangs, bass thumps and then more and more layers and elements, a breakbeat and laser beams, a kick drum, and eventually as we head towards the ten minute mark, strings and piano-  celestial music, not drifting or aimless but heading ever onwards. How this album isn't better known and more praised is a mystery. 

Alpha Phase