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 Make a blank valuable by putting it in an exquisite frame.

Which led in a round the houses kind of way to Half Man Half Biscuit's Eno Collaboration from 1997, Pet Shop Boys in 1987, Talking Heads and Johnny Marr in 1988, and Bob Dylan with The Band back in 1971. 

The joy of this series is in the comments box. Last week's suggestions from the Bagging Area Oblique Saturdays community took in Cowboy Junkies doing Sweet Jane (thank you Walter), Nick Drake's Bryter Later (Ernie, muchas gracias), Aztec Camera's Just Like Gold (courtesy of the shape shifting but definitely human LizLozLaz, and thanks to C for her questions about his comments), Matt Berry's cover of the Blankety Blank theme tune (thanks to Al G and Mrs G), Rol who offered Jason Isbell's 24 Frames, John Cage's 4' 33'' (ta The Swede) and over on social media Chris who jumped from Les Dawson to Andrew Weatherall via Field Of Dreams. 

At some point there's an Oblique Saturdays mix/ compilation/ box set and your names are all on it. 

Just Like Gold

Roddy's never re- issued (to the best of my knowledge) the two singles Aztec Camera did for Postcard, never included them on a any compilations. His view is they are best as they were, a pair of 7" singles from 1981, the magic found solely in those artefacts.  

This week's Oblique Strategy from Mr Eno and Herr Schmidt is this- Look closely at the most embarrassing details and amplify them. 

I can see how a band or musician in the studio could approach this. Take the mistake or the part that makes you cringe (a vocal yelp maybe or a hackneyed chord sequence) that you want to cover up or remove and make it the new centre of the song/ track/ recording. 

I found it more difficult to apply the suggestion to songs to post here and spent some time while commuting to and from work thinking about it. I don't buy into the Guilty Pleasures thing much- you shouldn't feel guilty about liking any piece of music. If you like it, you like it. The fact that someone else doesn't is just that it all comes down to taste. 

Eventually, this song came to mind...

Fight For Your Right

The Beastie Boys themselves became somewhat embarrassed by the success of this song, the fourth single from their debut Licensed To Ill. They became even more embarrassed, annoyed even, by the fact their audience were taking the song seriously, as a statement of fact. They spent a long time trying to distance themselves from it. One way or another it led them to the sampledelic brilliance of Paul's Boutique though so maybe it was worth it. 

Everything about Fight For Your Right is amplified, from the opening guitar power chord and the shout of 'Yeahhh!', the instruction to 'kick it!' and then the riff, Rick Rubin turning everything up as loud as it will go. And then there's the lyrics....

I played Fight For Your Right while DJing at a friend's wedding reception, many many years ago. The groom's mother loved it, pogoing round the venue's dance floor,among the rest of the party rights fighters. 

As a Saturday fourth of July bonus I'm posting this, Galaxie 500 back in 1990 with a song that is just wonderful in every way. 

Fourth Of July

Aidan

Sister Ray Davies are a duo from Muscle Shoals, Alabama and make a glorious shoegaze sound inspired in large part by the early Christian, pre- Norman world of the Northumbrian coast. If you think that all sounds unlikely for a band from Alabama, I'd agree. They released an album in late 2025 called Holy Island, named after Lindisfarne, Medieval home of Saint Aidan, an Irish monk who is said to have converted the Anglo- Saxons of Northumbria to Christianity in the middle of the 7th century. 

Sister Ray Davies followed the album with an EP called Holy Island Baby in April, five new versions and remixes of tracks that include two Pye Corner Audio remixes. The Pye Corner Audio remix of Aidan is something else, a six minute channeling of the spirit of New York's Suicide crossed with Pye Corner Audio's analogue synth drones topped with blissed out, barely there vocals and Sister Ray Davies' guitar drones peering through. It's a beautiful way to spend six minutes of your life

Aidan was known for his strict asceticism and utter conviction in talking to the people of the region at their own level, taking an interest in their lives and slowly converting them to Christianity. What he would have made of 21st century ambient/ shoegaze is anyone's guess but I'm fairly sure if he heard it while near the altar in the monastery on Holy Island he'd have taken it as evidence of the divine. 

There are more versions on the EP- a Pye Corner Audio remix of Morning Bell that shimmers and sways in a shoegaze drift. There is a guitar version of Big Ships that echoes Ride's Vapour Trail with nine acoustic guitar players creating an epic wall of strings and hollow bodied guitars, and a Malaphors version of Nave that is fractured and abstract. The EP is at Bandcamp, digital and vinyl (the vinyl is sold out at Bandcamp but there are copies to be found elsewhere). 

Return To Bass

A week of new album reviews hits a hat- trick today with the second album from Craig Bratley, an eight track excursion called Return To Bass. Craig's first album came out in 2014 so it's been a mere twelve years waiting for a follow up. In the time between the two he has put out some singles and EPs including Play The Game (with Danielle Moore) in 2016 which had an Andrew Weatherall remix, as did 2018's 99.9% (Andrew's remix was titled the 100% Remix, based on Andrew's advice to Craig that you should only put out music if you're 100% happy with it). You can find 99.9% (Andrew Weatherall's 100% remix) and the rest of the EP at Bandcamp. 

In 2019 Craig released a four track Italo/ cosmic inspired EP called A Message From The Outpost and then in 2021 a fantastic 12" with New York singer Amy Douglas on vocals, No In Between. 

No In Between turns up in dub form on Return To Bass, the slo mo, fuzzed out, dubbed out crawl of the Ashigaru Dub, Amy's voice fed through the delay FX as ghostly piano and guitar chords get the same treatment. The album is, no surprise given its title, a tribute to the properties and power of bass music in various forms- Jamaican, electronic, acid house and electro. First track Plasticine Dub marries deep Jamaican bass with North African melodies and vocals, dub from the souk and the Atlas Mountains. A voice gives instructions about love and harmony, living in unity, no more war. 

Everybody Pushing is a nod to the halcyon days of the early 90s, the acid house vibes of The Beloved and Finitribe, the voice of Thomas Gandey recalling the singers of both those bands. On S.A.W. Craig gives us throbbing, buzzing Roland TB- 303 acid qne Thanks For All The Fish is a dance floor monster resplendent with four four drums, hi hats, pumping bass, a cackling voice and tumbling percussion- eventually synths stabs blare and sirens go off and a chant breaks out, 'you gotta beat the clock/ you gotta beat the clock'. 

The album ends with Everybody Pushing Reprise, a version of Everybody Pushing, the drums, bass and vocals dropped out leaving just the synth chords, a New Age/ ambient cinematic ending that chills the album right down, a kiss goodnight. 

More Songs About The Sun

The newest Pye Corner Audio album came out ten days ago and in some ways it works as the flipside to yesterday's post, Boards Of Canada's Inferno. More Songs About The Sun was timed to release with the summer equinox and just as with the gloom and end of days song titles of Inferno, Pye Corner Audio's track titles promise something more optimistic- hope and renewal- with Euphoria, Greet The Dawn, Rays Of Sunshine, As We Begin and My Shimmer all offering positivity. 

Andy Bell appears (again) providing guest guitar on four tracks. Album opener Euphoria fades in with sunlit analogue synth sounds and vibrato and then some distorted chord changes- cosmische and indeed euphoric. A drum machine patters into life and the floating becomes more propulsive. Third track in is Cycle, one with Andy Bell, the thrum of drums and bass, cosmische guitar, epic synth chord changes and a blissed out vocal. 

In the past Pye Corner Audio has made much more dystopic sounding tracks, subterranean ambient, inflected with a similar hauntology to where some of Boards Of Canada's sounds are coming from but on More Songs About The Sun, he's very much heading towards the light. Ambient shoegaze, radiophonic workshop vibes, modular synths. Eight Thousand Years has a rhythm part that blips and blops beautifully accompanied by chord change straight out of West Germany in the 1970s. 

On The Breath Of Now Scottish crime writer Ian Rankin gives a spoken word performance, low key and soft, 'no heroes come out at night', and a moment where the album has some shade to contrast with the light. 

The final four tracks form a serene ending with Rays Of Sunshine giving way to As We Begin (another one with Andy Bell and his guitar), a warm drone offset by distant chord changes and keys. Echoes of My Bloody Valentine's string bending/ head rush sensation. The drums kick in and synths and guitars suddenly switch to sounding all golden. My Shimmer is three minutes of ambient wonder, layers of drones, chords and notes, a choral finale, and we're left to come down with the fifty seven seconds of Blooms Fade, recognising that in nature all things must pass, the seasons change the end of summer, the cycle continues, the autumn equinox must surely follow. For the moment though, 1st July, More Songs About The Sun is exactly what this summer needs. 

More Songs About The Sun is out now on Sonic Cathedral and can be found at Bandcamp, available digitally, on CD and in an array of gorgeously packaged and presented vinyl versions. 

Inferno

The long awaited new Boards Of Canada album- Inferno- came out a month ago. I've been meaning to write about it ever since. Sometimes in the ever increasing velocity of the modern world there is a temptation or urge to comment immediately, the post a review or hot take RIGHT NOW! and I think I've been trying to fight that with Inferno, subliminally maybe, and give it time to soak in and see what I make of it not on the day of release but a month later. It's very much an album that is designed as an album, with a theme running through it, to be taken in one sitting. 

There's been a thirteen year gap between Inferno and its predecessor, 2013's Tomorrow's Harvest. In that time the BoC duo have had a lot of time on their hands to work out their next step. That thirteen year gap has coincided with a lot of things happening on the geopolitical scale and while Boards Of Canada may not be overtly political they have absolutely made music that reflects the modern age. An audio mirror, transmitting the unease and disquiet of the 21st century and steeped in hauntology, voices from the 1970s and 80s repurposed. Public information films. Waco and David Koresh. Ecological disaster. Promised but undelivered futures. False memories. Childhood. Our culture's fixation with both nostalgia and modernity. 

Inferno is all of this and more, the soundtrack to societal collapse. There are muffled, hip hop drums, woozy synths and sounds that could be My Bloody Valentine's guitars taped and sampled from a transistor radio. Backwards sounds and static. Music for the half world between dreaming and being wake, the feeling that you've dozed off with the late night 24 hour news playing. Organised religion is on their minds too. 

In Age Of Capricorn a voice from American TV reads out nonsense as a synth pattern wobbles away. Another voice comes in, 'I see you!' it says, 'Come into my heart, save me!'. On Naraka the synths and chords are urgent, the title music to a dramatic current affairs news programme announcing the apocalypse, modular synth notes blurred with South Asian singing and a low growl. Chords that nod to late 90s/ early 2000s Warp. The BoC pair have pulled Naraka out of the fire, a track to stand alongside their best. Naraka is Sanskrit for Hell. 

Inferno is four sides of vinyl, seventy minutes and eighteen tracks long. It's a whole piece not a collection of tracks. You could argue it's a bit too long but it's an investment- you have to see it through and although there may be a couple of missteps, it's rewarding and illuminating. It's not cheery- the track titles alone give you an idea of what to expect (Memory Death, Blood In The Labyrinth, All Reason Departs, The Process). Nothing quite does what you expect it to- they are masters at jarring sounds, melodies suddenly leaping out of the blue, repeating for a few seconds and then vanishing, drum tracks that are slightly off or that hang around for an irregular numbers of bars. Wrongfooting the listener is all part of the experience. 

Dark, gloomy, intense, the sound of a world burning- Inferno is all of these things but at the end there is some light with the two minutes and thirty nine seconds of I Saw Through Platonia, a calming, ambient haze, gently shifting synth sounds and a faint pulsebeat, the sound of human life continuing. It may not be saying 'don't worry, everything's gonna be alright' but it does offer some relief, a counterpoint to the malaise and just maybe the promise of better days (or at the least the soundtrack to drift off to as the ship goes down).

 

Monday's Long Song

Love Cry is nine minutes and fourteen seconds long and not a single second of it is wasted or superfluous. The long drone intro, interrupted eventually by some off kilter computer sounds flitting in and the thrum of bass, set up the remaining eight minutes. The drums kick in after a minute, rattling and urgent, there are synth squiggles and a three note refrain and after four minutes a vocal, a female voice fed through some kind of FX, intoning 'love cry'. The voice and synths get more and more mangled, the drums and patterns looped and repeated, the musical equivalent of a Möbius loop. Kieran breaks the whole thing apart eventually, the loops collapsing into each other and then a gentle ending, the calm after the storm. I have many favourite Four Tet tracks and Love Cry is absolutely one of them. 

Love Cry

An Hour Of Balearic Beats

Today's Sunday mix comes courtesy of Leo Mas, a veteran of Ibiza in the 80s, a DJ at Amnesia from 1985 onward and one of the pioneers of what became known as the Balearic Beat. Leo has done a 1987 mix, an hour long set split into two halves and out digitally and on cassette (for the genuine 1987 experience). 

It covers all the ground you'd hope it would, the anything goes, freewheeling spirit that he and Alfredo and others found in Ibiza and played in their sets- the ten minute sampler at Bandcamp bounces out of the speakers with The Woodentops and Why Why Why and from there heads into anything and everything Leo fancied playing that had a beat- EBM (Front 242's Join In The Chant), proto- house and techno, Belgian New Beat, goth synth pop and electro and more. 

You can get The Dark Side (Irriverent Mix) at Bandcamp. There are two ten minute previews. The whole hour long mix can be found if you click buy.