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 Emphasise difference.

I responded to this with Iggy Pop's journey from 1973 to 1977, from Death Trip to Lust For Life and with The Clash who went from White Riot in 1976 to Death Is A Star in 1983. 

Someone pointed out this week when commenting on the race riots in Southampton and Belfast that they didn't think this was the kind of White Riot Joe Strummer was talking about which is indeed true. Joe would have been appalled by the rise of far right politics in the UK. But I digress...

The Bagging Area OS squad came up with some great replies emphasising difference- Martin Carthy covering Slade, Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood's very different voices, Thomas Dolby and Prefab Sprout, Talk Talk, Cindytalk, Rodney Allen's Happy Sad, Paula Abdul and a cartoon cat...

... Elvis, Propaganda, Donny and Marie Osmond, Tonio K, and Boogie Down Productions. Thanks everyone- Chris, Walter, C, Khayem, Ernie, The Swede, Jase, Al G, Rol and Beerfueled as ever for your considered contributions.

This week's card says this- Ghost Echoes.

Just a few days before I turned the card over I finished Patti Smith's memoir Just Kids. It was published in 2010 and I've no idea why I only got a copy recently but I'm glad I did. It's a beautiful, powerful and poetic account of her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe. Patti promised Robert she'd tell his story as he lay dying from complications due to AIDS. She attempted to do this with The Coral Sea but was often unable to get through a reading of the poem. Twenty years after his death, she felt able to write their story down. Her use of the written word is beautiful, as you might expect- she's a wordsmith if nothing else. The book is gripping, open and honest, with versions of their two childhoods and then their chance encounter in New York. She writes about her move to New York as a nineteen year old, an intense and slightly damaged young woman in love with Arthur Rimbaud, inspired by The Doors and Bob Dylan. Her early life in the city is a life of penury, of living hand to mouth and sometimes sleeping in doorways. Eventually she meets Robert (he rescues her from a predatory middle aged man who has taken her out for a meal and now expects something in return) and they live together as lovers and as artists, a completely bohemian life, inspiring each other. Robert is clearly struggling with his sexuality during this period and eventually they split but remain together. Their move to the Hotel Chelsea and the people they meet there changes both their lives and their relationship and their art. Just Kids tells their story up to the release of Horses, Patti finding her calling as a poet and then merging poetry with rock 'n' roll- and then to Robert's death in 1992. 

The copy I have has extra material at the book, and Robert Mapplethorpe's ghost is present there in photos and drawings, in poems and art. He haunts the pages as he undoubtedly still haunts Patti. In a sense though, in the pages that make up the bulk of the book, the story of Robert and Patti, he is very much alive; she brings him (and a lost world, New York in the late 60s and early 70s) to life. In the book, after speaking to a very ill Robert on the phone in 1992, a conversation she knows will be their last, she wakes up a few hours later and intuits his death.

Land (Part One: Horses Part Two: Land Of A Thousand Dances)

There is no shortage of songs with the word ghost in the title- step up The Gun Club, Andrew Weatherall, The White Stripes and Tegan and Sarah, Fine Yong Cannibals, The Fall and R. Dean Taylor, Daniel Avery, Broken Chanter, The Jam, Reverb Delay, Kristen Hersh, The Orb, Burning Spear, The Replacements, The Vendetta Suite,  Denise Sherwood, Hollie Cook, Trentemoller and The Style Council among others.... on and on we could go. 

This 2019 song from Circle Square though seems the one that has both ghosts and echoes contained within, Richard Norris and Martin Dubka's Ghost In The Machine,  a voice trapped inside a machine, echoing on and out for as long as the machine is plugged in.

Feel free to drop your own Ghost echoes into the comment box. 

Multiforms

Marconi Union's new album Multiforms: Ambient Transmissions Vol. 3 comes out today, six pieces of deep ambient music, each around eight minutes long, that form a single whole, each track merging itself into the next. The long slow opening into Multiforms I, drones and sound gently building, breaks at five minutes with a wordless voice and synths sounds that bend towards the light, a gentle ascent. Multiforms II drifts in with the sound of wind and then synth tones. The beatlessness and weightlessness continues as II segues into III, a movement with a piano line taking the lead, rising and falling over the drone. 

IV picks up and a rhythm kicks in, not a drum but something approaching a pulsebeat that propels us forwards, arpeggios gradually pulling clear of a distorted fuzz. Insistent and hypnotic. Multiforms V has layers of sound, more drones, an electric bass possibly, an oscillating topline and then a clear and rich ringing melody line, coming from I think a clarinet. The final part is VI, a return to blur and haze, ringing drones and long keening notes, Marconi Union bringing us through to the end slowly and a gentle, slightly melancholy conclusion. Trip over. 

The album is available at Just Music along with much of the rest of their back catalogue. There's a full length visualiser of Multiforms Vol. 3 to add to the immersive experience, the visuals to accompany the audio.

This is last year's Marconi Union album, their twelfth, Fear Of Never Landing- another full length immersive deep listening experience, very much an album to unplug from the world and surrender to for the time it plays.  

World Cup Theme

I wrote this post out and then nearly deleted it last night- well, most of it, I'd have left the music in, two tracks at the bottom of the post both named World Cup Theme. It seemed unnecessarily gloomy and a bit of a rant. What's the point in moaning about an international sporting tournament? If you don't like it, don't watch it, I told myself. I barely watched any of the last one, a one- man boycott that had no impact on anyone but me. 

The World Cup starts today, Mexico playing South Africa in Mexico City at 8pm our time. I'm struggling to find much enthusiasm for it. Once upon a time the World Cup seemed to have a magic of its own, players you'd never see on the TV, exotic sounding Brazilian players with one word names (Zico, Eder, Socrates), world class players appearing on our televisions in kits you only saw in photos in magazines- the specific blue of the Italy shirt, Brazil's dusty yellow, Argentina's blue and white stripes with black short and socks, Peru with a sash across the front of the shirt, Belgium, Denmark and the Netherlands. Foreign players and national sides were a rarity, a once every few years treat. By the time of the USA '94 tournament we might have seen the top Italian sides play on Channel 4 on a Sunday afternoon but there was a scarcity to the World Cup that gave it a lustre, an experience no other sporting tournament offered. 

That special nature and a sort of vague purity that the World Cup had- no transfers, no money splashed buying the best players, sides made up of just those players who happen to have been born in the same nation state at around the same time- has been completely sullied by modern day FIFA. The 2018 World Cup was in Putin's Russia (he'd already annexed Crimea by this point). The last one was in Qatar, stadia constructed using modern day slave labour. This one is in Trump's USA as well as Canada and Mexico. The 2034 one is in Saudi Arabia. It's seems like FIFA are deliberately awarding the World Cup to authoritarian states. I look forward to China and North Korea co- hosting in 2038. 

FIFA's man in charge is Gianni Infantino, the man who gave Trump a specially created, just- for- him, FIFA peace prize to make up for those nasty people at Nobel not giving him theirs. Not long after he started bombing Iran. He's still at it, no closer to peace than he was in February. Sepp Blatter was a truly awful FIFA president but at least his only fault was he was on the make, taking backhanders for votes. Infantino makes Blatter look like a model leader. 

The ticket prices in the US are sky high, reflecting apparently the dynamic pricing model of the US sports market. They're having a half time show in the final. They've prevented some members of the Iranian squad and a Somali referee from entering the country. ICE will be present at the matches. They've expanded the tournament to forty eight teams which looks likely to increase the number of meaningless group stage matches, Infantino labouring under the illusion that more is better, that bigger is better. Cristiano Ronaldo had a red card rescinded so he can appear in the group stage games for Portugal- a decision made for commercial and television reasons, not sporting ones. 

I could go on. It all seems depressingly gaudy and corrupt, a TV show about a sport, an empty vessel celebrating the worst of the 21st century, late stage capitalism and authoritarian regimes. 

Maybe I'll get drawn in once it starts. 

In the meantime, good luck Mexico! I hope you go all the way, meeting Iran in the final. The thought of thousands of Mexican and Iranian fans celebrating on US soil makes me smile. Highly unlikely of course- underdogs never win the World Cup, it's always won by one of the top two or three sides. That counts both England and Scotland out too I think. 

A few weeks ago my friend Pandit Pam Pam, an ambient/ electronic artist from Sao Paulo, Brazil, put out a track titled World Cup Theme (Goalkeeper)- a lovely, spritely slice of instrumental synth music. You can listen to it here. 

It reminds me of this from 1986, Colourbox's Official World Cup Theme, one that like Pandit Pam Pam's was released to coincide with a World Cup held in Mexico. 

The Official Colourbox World Cup Theme

Let The Music Play

The Coral, the Wirral psychedelicists who have releasing records since their late teenage years in the early 00s are back with their thirteenth album, a nine song album called 388 (named after the Tascam 388 tape recorder they made the album on and also the type used by Lee Scratch Perry at Black Ark). The Lee Perry reference is apt because the first single- Let The Music Play- is a smokey, fuzzy skank, a nod of the pork pie hat to the rocksteady singles coming out of Jamaica in the 60s and to the tunes the band heard at a Wirral Youth club in the 90s. 

Let The Music Play is a joy, an echo drenched rocksteady rhythm and some high pitched harmonies, James Skelley opening the song with the lines,'Play that song again/ The one we used to smoke to/ When we were young'. There are wobbly horns, brushed drums all very natural and easy going. Music made by music lovers.  

The album follows in that feel by all accounts- I haven't heard it yet and it's currently a physical only release but on the basis of Let The Music Play it's gone straight onto my post- payday list of records to buy. 

The last couple of Coral albums have been concept albums- 2021's Coral Island and 2023's Sea Of Mirrors- and both blended cosmic scouse psychedelia with country and folk. Faceless Angel was the first single from Coral Island, Bo Diddley in West Kirby. 

Faceless Angel

Train Dreams And Undiscovered Shores

Secret Soul Society released a new EP two weeks ago on a Madrid based label Rare Wiri. Train Dreams has five tracks. The first, Take Me In, is a lovely slice of Balearic pop with warm padding drums, sunshine synths and a vocal declaring, 'something's happening in my heart'. The title track Train Dreams follows, pulsing Italo disco crossed with Kraftwerk style rhythms and bursts of synth noise and lasers. There's a remix of Train Dreams too by Popsneon which takes the train into cosmic disco territory. 

In the middle of the EP is Everybody Needs A Good Friend, a rather beautiful piece of electronic Balearica. The vocal, just two lines of lyric, might be familiar to some of you. Everybody Needs A Good Friend and the other four tracks on Train Dreams can be found at Rare Wiri's Bandcamp here.

Brighton's Higher Love Recordings have been quiet of late but return to action with an EP by Mass Density Human called The Undiscovered Shore- a trio of tracks based around the idea of coastlines, imaginary shores and the borderlands between sleep and being awake. Do You bumps in with some crashing drums but the synths and piano chords gradually take it to more chilled territories- heavy waves crashing on shores followed by smaller, gentler ones maybe. 

The Body is full of fluid, liquid bass and gently rippling synthlines, a voice occasionally muttering something, like hearing someone when you're half asleep. The Undiscovered Shore is all ambient beauty, layers of drones and notes falling like water droplets, seagulls squawking and then more piano. Another voice, this one talking about rescue, and six very lovely minutes of drift. You can get The Undiscovered Shore here. 

Monday's Long Song

Over the weekend I was suddenly struck the need to hear Tangled Up In Blue, one of Bob Dylan's finest songs- the words, the playing, the production and the singing, the way he paints so many vivid images of five minutes, the internal rhymes and the lovers crossing paths as the song shifts back and forth in time and across places, Delacroix and Montague Street, New Orleans and the great north woods. The ending, where Dylan returns to find the her, and he sings that all those people he used to know are an illusion to him now, 'some are mathematicians/ some are carpenters' wives', a line that always jumps out- mathematicians and carpenters' wives is so specific and so odd.

Having scratched my Tangled Up In Blue itch I sat down and listened to Blood On The Tracks all the way through. There's an argument thatit's Dylan's best album. It's definitely his best album of the 70s and after shedding fans and critical adoration with a run of albums in the first half of the decade (Self Portrait, New Morning, Dylan and Planet Waves all have their moments but none touch his 60s work or Blood On The Tracks) it can be viewed as a comeback with nine absolute top drawer Dylan songs (and Lily, Rosemary And The Jack Of Hearts which is fun but for me inessential). 

It's widely seen as an album that describes the breakdown of his marriage to Sarah Lowndes following an affair he had. Jakob Dylan says the album is 'about my parents'. Dylan denies that the album is autobiographical or confessional, saying in Chronicles Vol. 1 that all the songs were inspired by short stories by Chekhov (Anton Chekhov not Star Trek's Mr. Chekhov). I'm not sure Dylan is a completely reliable witness but then again, he's Bob Dylan, who are we to doubt him?

Four songs in to Side One of Blood On The comes the epic seven minutes and forty eight seconds of Idiot Wind. It starts off with a complaint about someone who has it in for him, 'planting stories in the press', and goes on from there, by turns reflective, indignant, vindictive and despairing. Some of it is aimed at a 'sweet lady', some at himself perhaps, the idiot wind that blows 'every time you move your mouth... it's a wonder that you still know how to breathe'. There's biblical imagery, fortune tellers, boxcars and lone soldiers, a chestnut mare and a priest wearing black on the seventh day. The idiot wind blows everyone away and eventually the nation, 'from the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol' (and this is the mid- 70s of defeat in Vietnam, Nixon's disgrace and resignation so the idiot wind has blown all the way to the very top).

In the end though it blows on him and on her- 'Idiot wind/ Blowing through the buttons of our coats/ Blowing through the letters that we wrote/ Blowing through the dust upon our shelves/ We're idiots babe/ It's a wonder we can even feed ourselves'.

Idiot Wind

Forty Five Minutes Of Japanese Psyche

For the last two months Ernie of 27 Leggies and myself have been engaging in a long running duel- think Ridley Scott's masterful 1977 film The Duellists where Harvey Keitel and Keith Carradine engage in a long running feud during the Napoleonic Wars. 

Mine and Ernie's duel is not due to an imagined slight and a stain on an officer's honour- at least I don't think it is- but is a duel of Japanese psyche bands, a to and fro  between two music blogs, each raising the stakes slightly with a post featuring obscure Japanese rock bands playing psyche, acid, prog, punk, ambient, psychedelic, noise and jazz inflected rock. Ernie went last with a post in May celebrating Kuunatic. Today's Sunday mix is something of a post holder while I consider where to go next, forty five minutes of music made by a variety of Japanese psyche bands featured either here or at 27 Leggies. Three quarters of an hour of Japanese psyche may not be your Sunday morning cup of green tea but in the spirit of adventure and experimentation I offer it up anyway. 

Forty Five Minutes Of Japanese Psyche

• Boredoms: Free (End Of Session Version)
• Kikagaku Moyo: Zo No Senaka
• Bo Ningen: Triangle
• Kuunatic: Desert Empress Pt. 1
• Yura Yura Teikoku: Dekinai (Extended Remix)
• Kikagaku Moyo: Majupose
• Yura Yura Teikoku: Sweet Surrender (Remix)

Boredoms are from Osaka, a noise rock band who formed in 1986 and have a huge, rambling back catalogue. They formed a friendship with Sonic Youth and as a result got exposure in the USA and played 1994's traveling circus Lollapalooza. Free is a cover of a song by Phish,  a rather lovely and chilled ambient track that leads us gently into the mix...

... whereupon Kikagaku Moyo take over- heavy, overloaded psychedelic rock, drums and guitars, wah wah pedals and valve amps pushed to their limits, chanted vocals, sitar, theremin. Kikagaku Moyo formed in 2012 and went on hiatus in 2022, a decade of psyche. Zo No Senaka is a live recording, the band playing a wedding at Hasenheide near Innsbruck and the album recorded and given to the guests and helpers with a further 300 copies made available to fans via the band's website. 

Bo Ningen's Triangle is the fifteen minute closing track from a 2021 re- recording of the band's 2011 debut album, a rebuild. I shaved four minutes off the start here, so that Bo Ningen kick in where Kikagaku Moyo left off. Bo Ningen are a fearsome live band and have found many supporters in the UK and Europe. They've played with Damo Suzuki, Savages and Faust and Bobby Gillespie has sung with them. 

Kuunatic are an all female trio from Tokyo who make 'tribal, dramy, tale music' (their description not mine) with keys, bass and drums and three way vocals. Experimental prog and psyche merged with sci fi and Japanese folk while wearing robes and headdresses. What's not to like?

Yura Yura Teikoku (translation- the wobbling empire) formed in Tokyo in 1989, underground psychedelia but with a commercial edge that led them to New York's DFA who put out a 2007 EP with Dekinai on one side and Sweet Surrender on the other. Terrific James Murphy endorsed electro/ punk funk. 

Mata ne.