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 'Disconnect from desire'.

Disconnection from desire came via Gala, The Beastie Boys and Scritti Politti. From the Bagging Area readership pool, Ernie was in first with Alessandro Moreschi, L. Braynstemmmmm suggested Kraftwerk's Computer Love, Rol offered Claudie Frish- Mentrop and Expendables' Man With No Desire and Jase gave us Sinead and I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got. Chris also offered Sinead's second album and suggested the Apple Brightness Mix of I Am Stretched On Your Grave which has a sample of How Soon Is Now buried within it.  

This week's card said this- Breathe more deeply.

Good advice. Useful for dealing with stress, increasing mood and focus. 

In the studio breathing more deeply could be interpreted as an instruction to let the music breathe, to slow it down, leave more space between the notes, focus on what you're not playing as much as what you are. It makes me think of Basic Channel, the Berlin techno duo who made dub- techno so minimal, so stripped down that it almost became something not music- just pure sound, a breathing exercise. 

This one is fifteen minutes long and from 1994. The dull thud of a muffled kick drum, a ball of barely there static, a repeating synth sound. Inhale exhale.  

Quadrant Dub I

I also thought of this from Deanne Day, a mid- 90s pseudonym used by Andrew Weatherall and David Harrow on three 12" singles. D and A. Andrew had dropped out of view a little post- Sabres, a choice to shun from the bright lights and the greasy pole. Blood Sugar was a deep house/ dub techno night he put on and Deanne Day fits in very well with that sound- kick drum, hiss of hi hat, lots of space, that vocal sample, 'I can hardly breathe', and a bassline to groove to. Another nearly fifteen minute long track.

Hardly Breathe

Inhale exhale. Calm in repetition. 

Later on the vocal becomes, 'When you stand there/ When you stand naked/ Looking at you'. Less calming perhaps. 

The synths swirl, the drums drop out, the bass bumps away, the snare rattles. A few minutes later (and nothing happens in a rush in Hardly Breathe, everything plays out for bars, unfolds in its own time) a long two note chord moves in. 

Andrew had a thing when making records around this time, as Deanne Day or Blood Sugar. There could only be four elements going on at once. If you wanted to add a new sound, you had to remove one. It kept it minimal and focused. Restrictions as a creative tool- which sounds like an Oblique Strategy. 

Feel free to make your own Breathe more deeply responses into the comments box. 

Primal And Unholy

Two new releases, single tracks and both out this week. On Tuesday Prana Crafter, a Washington state based solo artist who has tended to the ambient and beatific previously, released a furious and transcendental guitar instrumental called Unholy Wars accompanied by the statement 'ALL wars are unholy wars'. Prana Crafter's guitar starts out ringing, some feedback, the amp and fuzz front and centre. The tone gets darker a minute in, unmistakably angry and frustrated at the state of the world. Stop- start riffs. Single notes rippling on top. Hendrix at Woodstock. Neil Young and Ohio. War pigs. It speeds up, faster- punk's inchoate fury. A smoked out coda, the amp being pushed to its limits. Space rock for peace cadets. 

Unholy is at Bandcamp, free/ pay what you want. 

Yesterday Stourbridge's acid house/ dark Balearica/ cosmic chug king Dirt Bogarde released Primal, a six minute thumper, bursts of distorted synths over gnarly bass. The kick drum continues relentlessly, and the hoover synth sounds increase, ratcheting the tension higher. The serious business of dark dance music, the flipside to sunshine and love. Midnight tension. Strobe lit and losing track of time. 

Primal is at Bandcamp, price one pound. 

A Thousand Threads

I recently read Neneh Cherry's autobiography A Thousand Threads. It's a reflective and honest look at her extraordinary, bohemian life, a life with moments and people that leave you feeling she was near the centre of almost everything that was interesting. Her childhood was unconventional and filled with experiences. Her mother Moki, a Swedish artist and 60s beatnik met Ahmadu Jah in Stockholm. He was a student on a scholarship, one of six men who left from Sierra Leone to study engineering. They moved in together and Moki got pregnant. Not long after, when she was five months pregnant, Moki found out that Ahmadu and monogamy were incompatible. Neneh was born in 1964. The year before Moki had met musician Don Cherry. When Ahmadu moves on, amicably, Moki and Don get together at a jazz gig in Stockholm and become a couple. Neneh is from thereon the child of three parents. 

Moki and Don spend Neneh's childhood shuttling between a life in idyllic Sweden, the family living in a converted school house that Moki has made the centre of her world, one where art and family life are one and the same, a home and performance space, and life in 70s New York. Don is a heroin addict and when in New York he often disappears for a couple of days to 'take care of some business'. The family accept Don's addiction and work with him and it but the terror of Don not coming home or dying in their flat creates a lifetime of issues for everyone. 

As well as Sweden and new York the family move to London. Neneh is transformed by punk, meets and befriends Ari Up, joins The Slits, starts a relationship with Bruce Smith (drummer in The Pop Group and later The Slits and New Age Steppers), has a child (at 16!), splits up with Bruce, meets Cameron McVeigh (producer of Massive Attack), makes her solo album, appears on Top Of the Pops eight months pregnant... its a whirl of art and culture and life, Neneh constantly inspired and inspiring. 

She's honest too- she admits that the moving around of her childhood was something she continued into her adult life and that maybe her own children might have benefited from a more stable home life. She l about her spiraling alcohol issues that follow Moki's death and the long periods where she writes and releases nothing, totally consumed by being a mother. 

One of the most affecting chapters describes her first visit to Sierra Leone. She arrives in full punk clobber, army boots and trousers, a Clash t- shirt and leather jacket, and as she is taken in by her African relatives she discovers and embraces that side of her family. When she returns to the UK and appears in the Earthbeat video (from The Slits second album) she is wearing the African clothing she brought back with her. 

Writing the book as a grandparent, she is clearly still getting her head round some of it. She is as proud of her achievements as a women and a mother as her ones as a musician. Race and sex are never far from the story. Her upbringing in Sweden as the only mixed race kid in the school. Her fusion of punk, hip hop and street soul into Buffalo Stance. Her adventures as a teen in New York's early 80s downtown clubland. Her first transatlantic flight as a five year old (flying solo, aged five). A trip to Japan as part of Ray Petri's Buffalo posse with The Face. An international smash hit single in the 90s with Youssou N'Dour.  It's all there and more. She's funny, wise and insightful, unapologetic in some ways but clear minded too and has lived a life. 

Some music...

Buffalo Stance is one of the late 80s best pop singles, a streetwise and sassy piece of pop- hip hop scratching and house grooves with Bomb The Bass' Tim Simenon producing (it was worked up from a B-side for a Stock Aitken and Waterman single Looking Good Diving that husband Cameron McVey and Jamie Murphy had recorded). Buffalo was Ray Petri's outfit, a bunch of artists, models, musicians and stylists who enjoyed a burst of fame in mid- to- late London. A Buffalo Stance is an attitude, a mode of survival in urban life- 'We always hang in a buffalo stance/  We do the dive every time we dance'.

Buffalo Stance

Woman came out nearly a decade later, a riposte to James Brown's It's A Man's Man's World and song about female empowerment. Dramatic strings that echo James Brown's, trip hop beats and written at a  time when fame was on the verge of destabilising her completely. 

Woman

Blank Project came out in 2014, an album produced by Keiran Four Tet Hebden. Sparse, minimal, electronics via jazz and soul. Uncompromising. I loved it back in 2014 and haven't listened to it for ages- it still sounds like a powerful piece of music.  

Blank Project

Exploding In Society's Eye

Spectators Of Suicide- how's that for a typically early Manic Street Preachers song title?- was on the You Love Us EP in 1991, the last thing the band released on Heavenly before they moved to Columbia. The EP's sleeve is also typically Manics with Beatrice Dalle as Betty Blue, Karl Marx, Robert Johnson and Travis Bickle all jostling for attention among brightly coloured cut and paste newspaper headline lettering. The title track is Manics punk, huge anthemic choruses, massive guitars and an arrogance that outweighed their then sales. 

Spectators Of Suicide could be by a completely different band- slowed down, ringing guitars, a sample of  Black Panther Bobby Seale saying he's gonna go down 'to the whole damn government and say ''stick em up motherfuckers we've come for what's ours''. The rippling guitar chords and notes and restrained vocals shimmer rather than slash and burn, the drums are in the room, the production is all about feel and tone. They sound like they're feeling their way into something.

Spectators Of Suicide  

Richie's lyrics take in democracy as a lie, obedience, choice (or lack of it), smoking as a lifestyle choice, advertising... concluding with James singing over the coda, 'You gonna shoot us dead/ With decadence'. 

The band re- recorded it for Generation Terrorists, an amped up, glam rock version in line with the rest of the album (although you can hear some of Motorcycle Emptiness's wasted beauty in the original version I think). In 2020 they did it again with Gwenno sharing the vocals, two versions (one sung in English and one in Welsh) in aid of two charities, Missing People and the Trussell Trust. You can get both of those here. Bigger, older and wiser- but I still prefer the first version and its demo quality. 

Iridescent

Indonesian five piece band Strange Fruit have an album out next month- Drips- which crosses the streams between cosmische, dreamy blissed out indie dance and shoegaze. The songs available so far, Iridescent and Monopolar, are floaty and chuggy, a splash landing in the sea where guitars meet electronics. Repetition as an end in itself, sun kissed vocal melodies, guitars and synths bathed in psychedelic light. Both of these should slow your circulation right down. 

Ahead of the rest of the album Strange Fruit have put out some remixes. Tom Furse of The Horrors takes Monopolar and slows it down, reverb soaked drums and FX with a heavy undertow. The vocals sound even more sleepy. 

Hardway Bros Sean Johnston has given Strange Fruit three new versions of Monopolar to play with- wisely they're releasing all three. The Hardway Bros Remix is a slo mo affair, an electronic squiggle riding on the top, a hypnotic and streamlined remix that glides off into the sunset. Jakarta via ALFOS. Sean's Live At The SSL Dub comes out shortly and is worth waiting for, a slowed down and laid back Hardway Bros version. 

Drips is out at Bandcamp. Find it here.  

Monday's Long Song

Echo and The Bunnymen are touring at the moment and walked into some difficulties last week with a few hit and miss reviews and a last minute cancelled gig in Manchester. They got back underway at Bristol and seem to be back on track but all is not well if you read between the lines. I've seen them several times in the last few years and always had a good night out- those songs, Ian in good voice, Will's guitar playing- but at some gigs others have attended Ian hasn't always been at his best and this seems to have been the case last week. Hopefully, he's OK. 

In 2013 Will and original bass playing Bunnyman Les Pattinson formed a side band, Poltergeist, a trio of cosmic explorers with Will very much free to indulge his psychedelic guitar dreams. The eight instrumental songs on Your Mind Is A Box (Let Us Fill It With Wonder) are all worthy of the time spent with them, Will and Les mining 70s cosmische, 60s psyche and scouse adventurism to fine effect. Over half the songs on the album stretch out over six minutes- this one, Cathedral, opens the record and gathers a head of steam, Will's guitars shimmering and careering over some lovely bass playing from Les. 

Cathedral

In the 70s, as Liverpool's punk scene spun into being Will lived on a flat with Paul Simpson (Teardrop Explodes, The Wild Swans, Care, solo, author, smart dresser) halfway between the city's pair of famous cathedrals. Leaving his front door and turning left or right would bring either the Anglican one or the Modernist Catholic one immediately into view. I've always assumed that this track is a tribute to one or the other or both. 

Forty Minutes Of Arthur Russell

Firstly I should probably admit to being in no way an expert on Arthur Russell. I've got various tracks and a handful of albums but don't feel like I've done much more than scratched the surface of his music and on top of that I always feel with Russell's music there's something unknowable about it, something just out of reach. Sometimes it feels like his songs drift by like they've been caught by the breeze. I often feel like I'm slightly out of step when listening to them- but when they hit though, when the penny drops, they have a deep impact. 

Arthur was a cellist, producer, singer and songwriter from Iowa who moved to New York in the mid- 70s and became very much a part of the Manhattan avant garde scene and then New York's disco world. He recorded dance music as Dinosaur L and moved in circles with Peter Gordon, Talking Heads, Allen Ginsburg and Nicky Siano. He released only two albums during his lifetime- 1983's Tower Of Meaning (an orchestral piece) and 1986's weird and wonderful World Of Echo (cello and voice, dub disco and acres of space and echo) plus an album as Dinosaur L 24- 24. Arthur died in 1992 from AIDS related illnesses. In the years since his death a series of albums have been released, putting more and more previously unheard Arthur Russell songs out into the world and his reputation and influence have grown and grown. 2004's Calling Out Of Context is as good a place to start with the posthumous releases along with The World Of Arthur Russell from the same year. 

This mix is based on my incomplete knowledge of Arthur's music and isn't much more than some of my favourites thrown together in an order that seemed pleasing. 

Forty Minutes Of Arthur Russell

• A Little Lost
• In The Light Of A Miracle
• Time Away
• Calling Out Of Context
• See Through Love
• In The Corn Belt (Larry Levan Mix)
• I Like You!
• That's Us- Wild Combination
• Let's Go Swimming

A Little Lost jumps in with Arthur singing 'I'm a little lost/ Without You/ That could be an understatement...' accompanied by his cello and warm, wobbly echo. It came out on the posthumous album Another Thought, the first recordings released after his death in 1993 and is a good scene setter for Arthur's music- all those weird, non- obvious qualities that make his songs so unique. See Through Love is from the same album, a song that bubbles and echoes, as if recorded underwater. 

In The Light Of A Miracle was another unreleased during his lifetime track, one that came out on Philip Glass's insistence on Another Thought. It was a Loft classic (David Mancuso's NY invite only underground dance party/ space) and has been remixed various times to transcendent effect. The version here is the original mix, a shapeshifting, otherworldly piece of music, impossible to pin down, floating in some space between avant garde, disco dub and house- while sounding like none of those. 

Time Away is from Love Is Overtaking Me, a record that is an outlier in the Russell catalogue- no jazz inflected disco or avant garde cello and space experiments but more traditional songs, just voice and acoustic guitar. Time Alone is minimal and naive, a song about tidying up his room, Modern Lovers indebted perhaps. 'I'm taking time away/ To dream'.

Calling Out Of Context is a collection of songs Arthur recored between 1985 and 1990, released in 2004 and containing some of his most brilliant work- the title track blends voice, percussion, guitar and keys and boundless experimentation to create something really special. That's Us- Wild Combination is from the same record, a joyous anthem with Jennifer Warnes sharing vocals. It seems to me that one of the main presences on these tracks, the main sounds, is New York, the spaces and rooms and spirit of the world he lived in. I Like You! is also from Calling Out Of Context, a strange and murky stew, electronics, cello, percussion and voice. 

In The Corn Belt was one of Arthur's Dinosaur L tracks, NY dance music remixed by Larry Levan, the man who DJed for a decade at Paradise Garage, splicing dub and disco, hugely influential and pioneering post- disco/ pre- house scene, playing records on turntables with live synths and drum machines. 

Let's Go Swimming is the final song on World Of Echo, a short and simple meditation and a totally unconventional marriage of cello, folk/ disco, tape delay and voice-

'To the north part of it
The country I was made to
Cause were you been I go
That's where you'll always go
I'm banging on your door
Up in the big blue sky
When you let the water in'