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 What wouldn't you do?

I went down a road of asking all the big musical questions and ended up with The Cramps asking about pussies and dogs and Buzzcocks asking why they can't touch it.  

Out in the Oblique Saturdays community there were a huge range of responses, a playlist with something for everyone. Al G went with Betty Boo, Spencer gave us Benedict Drew, Mrs G threw in Rage Against The Machine, Prue Leith offered up Tool (their second OS appearance), SRC gave us The Associates and their mantra for life ('If you can't do no good, then sucker, don't you do no harm'), Jase came with Mark Lanegan and Ecstasy, Passion And Pain, JC suggested Malcolm Middleton and Paul Haig, Rol offered Pet Shop Boys, Beerfeuled gave us Rick Astley, C suggested The Bangles and Frankie Valli, Ernie had Gina Birch's stilettos, Khayem arrived with Boney M and Half Man Half Biscuit (they don't often crop up together), The Swede dropped in with Frank Sinatra and Count Basie and Chris Yardley came with a fear of potholing and The Jesus And Mary Chain. 

Thank you everyone.

This week's card from Messrs Eno and Schmidt says this- You don't have to be ashamed of using your own ideas.

Thanks Brian and Peter. I'm not sure how to take that. The whole blogging lark is largely using my own ideas and churning out daily posts. Back in the mid- 2000s when I first started reading music blogs (the Golden Age of Music Blogging) I began frequenting The Vinyl Villain and Acid Ted, satisfying my twin searches for digital versions of 80s indie and 90s acid house. I used to frequent several blogs that are long gone- STX's Audio.Out was a goldmine for Weatherall and similar and Spoilt Victorian Child was good for guitars. Ripped In Glasgow was essential. Drew started up Across The Kitchen Table, London Lee's Crying All The Way To The Chip Shop was very good and Davy H's The Ghost Of Electricity was an eclectic source of tunes. Song For Toad. Seventeen Seconds. Dusty Sevens. Planet Mondo. There were others that I can't even remember the names of now. 

All of these people were writing music blogs and suitably inspired at the dawn of 2010 I thought I'd do the same, post a song a day for a year and see how it went. My own ideas included posting plenty of Andrew Weatherall, various Manchester and Factory related acts, and try to feature songs that had stories attached to them. There was a long running Friday series, Friday Night Is Rockabilly Night that began after a guest posting at The Vinyl Villain, where I wrote about Wayne Walker's classic 1956 song All I Can Do Is Cry. 

All I Can Do Is Cry

In the early days there was lots of 60s garage, regular Half Man Half Biscuit posts and a lot of Wild Billy Childish. The first Andrew Weatherall post and the very first Bagging Area post (1st January 2010) was pretty obtuse- an idiosyncratic and one off track from 2002 by Weatherall and Keith Tenniswood as The Black Balloons called Fowler's End. 

Fowler's End

But enough of this self- congratulatory navel gazing. Here are some other ideas...

A Good Idea

Sugar in 1992, Bob Mould churning up loud guitars with a summer drowning, channeling Debaser's bassline and taking Husker Du's wall of noise into the charts. 

The Better Idea 

It's Immaterial in 1986, a sumptuous and vivid backing track with one of those It's Immaterial half spoken word and half sung vocals about suffering and surviving. 

Jennifer Has Some Strange Ideas

Timothy J. Fairplay has made loads of really good solo records, vintage synths and drum machines with descriptions such as Stasi House and Dungeon Module. He's a lovely bloke too. Jennifer Has Some Strange Ideas is from an EP in Hoga Nord in 2017 called Mindfighter and is typically inventive and engaging analogue synth electro fun. 

Finally, Parquet Courts in 2012 with no ideas other than some rather lovely, shambling indie rock...

No Ideas

As ever, feel free to drop your own responses to the Oblique Strategy into the comment box- You don't have to be ashamed of using your own ideas.

Johatsu

Johatsu is a Japanese word which translates literally as 'evaporation', a word that describes those people in Japan who voluntarily, purposefully disappear from their lives, who leave their jobs and families and just vanish. It became a phenomenon in the 1960s and accelerated into the 1990s as Japanese society became increasingly debt reliant. Some people vanish on their own. Others employ the services of 'night movers', companies that exist to help people vanish without a trace. For whatever reason- debt, unhappiness, feeling trapped- thousands of Japanese people have deliberately disappeared. 

Johatsu is the title of David Harrow's new album, released this week. It's a beatless, ambient/ instrumental album created with piano, keys and modular synths, with layers of ringing drones, synth chords and notes, a full sound that lifts it beyond being ambient wallpaper. Some of the thirteen tracks on Johatsu evoke the feelings that the evaporated people might feel, before or after their act of self- disappearance. There's also a sense that these tracks are part of the ambient environment, a reflection of feeling and life and not merely the soundtrack to it. There's an unease about them, a disquiet, and also the suggestion of tension waiting to be released. Some of the titles are very Johatsu- As It Ends, The Night Movers, Between The Cracks, One Room, No Loyalty. Some are more oblique- Ace, Eel Pie. This is the album's opener, 60s...

No Loyalty comes towards the album's end, Japanese sounding instrumentation among the ambient analogue synths. In the end it's difficult to know where one's sympathies lie- with the disappearers, the Johatsu, or the people they leave behind. There aren't any easy answers. David doesn't provide any either but the thirteen tracks on Johatsu are highly evocative and a very complete piece of work. 

Johatsu is out on London label No Beats Aloud and can be found here. 

Rolling Down The Hill Snowballing Getting Bigger

I'm in the middle of a run of gigs throughout October and November. Mike D at Manchester's Albert Hall two days ago,Tuesday night, is going to stand out as a definite highlight, an hour long, life affirming blast of b- boy/ punk rock energy from Beastie Boy Michael Diamond and his young band The 5D. They appear on stage after a taped announcement about Mike D and his musical exploits and kick into Hello Brooklyn, the opener to a set peppered with songs from his solo album Thank You and some Beastie Boys classics. Mike and the band additionally make wearing pink sweat shirts and joggers look like a very good idea.

The songs from Thank You sound huge live, the six piece band hitting it with guitar, very loud bass, drums, samples, synths, keys and laptops, throwing themselves around and having the time of their lives. What We Want is loud and brash and is followed third song in by Looking Down The Barrel Of  A Gun, Beastie Boys own brand of punk rock from 1989's Paul's Boutique. Albert Hall erupts. 

Looking Down The Barrel Of A Gun

The Beastie Boys, three best friends from their teens, pulled off something really special. They could have been a brief controversy, a flash in the 80s pan. Instead they retreated and regrouped, resurrected themselves and became the best band in the world in the mid- 90s, a smart and savvy trio, tongue in cheek and taking the piss but also deadly serious- they knew that this stuff matters. They could switch effortlessly from punk to hip hop, from stoner rock to funk, the three way wordplay a kaleidoscope of references, and they made several albums that are head and shoulders above the rest of their 90s peers- after Paul's Boutique came Check Your Head, Ill Communication and Hello Nasty and then in 2004 To The 5 Boroughs. Mike D and Ad- Rock lost MCA/ Adam Yauch to cancer in 2012 and the band and the music went with him, until recently when Mike made Thank You. 

Two of the most powerful moments on Thank You come at the end of either side of the record and both are played tonight. I Don't Care comes halfway through, an acoustic guitar and drums and Mike singing about pressure and responsibilities and trying to cope with people's expectations. The other is the album's title song, Thank You, which closes the set, an emotive look back at his band's early days- 'We were just kids/ Figuring it out'- recalling being in New York clubs aged 16 and beginning to make music and finishing the song saying thank you to his friends, 'Thank you for having me'. It's not nostalgic or mawkish, it feels real. 

In between Mike and The 5D smash through the exuberant stuff- Crypto, Switch Up, Secrets Pt I and II- and some Beastie Boys songs- 3 Minute Rule, Body Movin' and a raucous Remote Control, a seven man ball of energy and fun. The solo songs and the Beastie Boys songs become one and we lap it up, dancing and arms in the air. 

At one point Mike makes a brief speech about Manchester and it's musical lineage and starts listing bands in his nasally NY twang- 'The Hacienda, Factory Records, Joy Division, New Order... Quando Quango, Du- rooti Column...' And there you have the crate digging, music loving Beastie Boys, Quando Quango mentioned before many more famous sons and daughters of the city. Members of 5D start shouting suggestions, 'Happy Mondays... Stone Roses.... The Fall!'. About to start the next song, Mike stops the band- 'oh yeah... The Smiths!'

The encore is just two songs, a massive sounding cover of Delta 5's Mind Your Own Business and finally, from 1992's Check Your Head, So What'cha Want. It's been a lot of fun, it's been loud and alive and full of energy and feeling. Thank you Mike D. 

Mind Your Own Business

So What'cha Want

Random Fall Song Wednesday

A song by The Fall plucked randomly from a folder named The Fall on my hard drive, several hundred songs in total. 

Wolf Kidult Man

'Wolf kidult man/ Wolf kidult son/ Where is your mum? Your power is gone'

From Imperial Wax Solvent, the twenty sixth Fall album, released in 2008, following 2007's Post Reformation TLC, an album made following a bust up that led to the band walking out on Mark E Smith during a US tour. The sample is from The Twilight Zone episode Printers Devil. 

Once There Was No Time Just Once

A Certain Ratio at Band On The Wall on Saturday night, the end of a tour where they've played a pair of their 80s albums in full, Sextet and Force- something they've not done before and won't do again. They start with Sextet, their third album, released on Factory in 1982 when they were young men in their early 20s. Martin Moscrop tells us just before the end that revisiting these songs and albums forty years later has been a strange experience, getting themselves into the heads of the 21 and 24 year olds who made them. The recent tours have seen ACR play a mixture of songs from their recent albums and 'the hits' (favourites I suppose rather than hits). Tonight there will be no Shack Up, no Won't Stop Loving You, no Do The Du. A different ACR experience. 

Sextet doesn't sound like a forty five year old record as played live. They start with its first song, Lucinda, minimalist post- punk jazz/ funk of 1982, Martin on drums, Don on slap bass, Jez centre on keys and bassist Viv playing guitar and singing Martha Tilson's vocals, the 1982 monochrome Lucinda in blasts of colour (like Sextet's vivid orange and green sleeve). The rest of the album is brought to life with Don back behind the drums, Viv on bass and Martin swapping between guitar, percussion and trumpet. The trumpet is the key sound on many of the songs, Martin transporting a 70s Miles Davis sound, two note refrains, to early 80s and mid 2020s Manchester. Knife Slits Water is full sounding punk funk and Rialto is urgent and alive. Jez introduces Waterline, added onto the end of the first set, as 'Andy Weatherall's favourite ACR song' and the band push and pull its weird, off kilter funk around, funk rhythms and jazz atonality with their Thin Boys punk attitude. 

A fifteen minute gap and ACR come back for Force, the 1986 album with Jez's vocals and lyrics more central. 'I didn't like Force when it came out', he says, 'I didn't know what these songs were about... I do now'. 

Force was ACR moving towards a more commercial sound, a dance rock/ jazz hybrid with verses and choruses, the chillier, bleaker themes and tones of their early songs now coloured in with splashes of mid- 80s fluoro. Only Together and funk bass epic Bootsy open the second set, Mickey Way- a long time fan favourite- is another jazz trumpet funk tune, Martin's trumpet and the synths and keys all ascending as the bass slaps and twangs away. Force was the first ACR album I bought in real time on release, so it's always been a big one for me. ACR playing it tonight doesn't feel like mid- 80s nostalgia or a revivalism, it doesn't particularly evoke 1986. Manchester's changed beyond recognition in the four decades since then. The band aren't the people they were then. Nor are we. These are those songs, redone for now. 

And The She Smiles is dedicated to two much missed women, Denise Johnston and Danielle Moore, and then the Force set is expanded with album's title track (not released at the time) and The Runner (from 1986 but originally released on Italian label Materiali Sonori as the Greetings Four EP). Both sound great, hyperactive and driving, busy but cut through with the Factory feel. 

The Runner

They finish as they usually do with the Manc- Brazilian percussion workout Si Firmi O Grido, all those cowbells, congas, whistles, drums and bongos bouncing around the old venue's walls. 

A Certain Ratio have released new versions of Sextet and Force. Sextet has been reworked by The Emperor Machine, 2026 updates of 1982 songs and Force has been re- issued in alternate versions, never heard before. The Joy Of Sextet is here and Force Majuere is here. 

Monday's Long Songs

In 1992 Underworld released Mmm... Skyscraper I Love You, a 12" single as good as anything else that came out that year. Skyscraper is a thirteen minute tribal/ techno/ progressive and ambient house tour de force with Rick Smith's synths and Darren Emerson's drum programming the perfect music backdrop for Karl Hyde's stream of consciousness mutterings and non- sequiturs. Hyde started the words on a plane coming in to land at New York. 

'Thirty thousand feet above the earth/ It's a beautiful thing'. 

He added more travelling round the city at ground level, a seemingly disconnected series of impressions and sketches. Porn dogs and Elvis and a little whipped cream. 

They moved music ahead with this release and 1993's album dubnobasswithmyheadman and sound like no one but themselves. It was a time when music felt as if it was in a constant state of progress and innovation. As well as the thirteen minute spectacular that also takes up much of side one of their 1993 masterpiece dubnobasswithmyheadman there were two further versions on the 12".

Telegraph is seven minutes long with a woman's voice saying the title and laughing. Bleepier and tougher, the tempo faster and into trance territory

Mmm... Skyscraper I Love You (Telegraph 6.11.92)

Jam Scraper is nine minutes, a bleepy synth squiggle over the top of those long Blade Runner synth chords and Karl's bending guitar note providing a long slow intro, anticipation that doesn't take off until two minutes in when the kick drum really starts to thump. 

Mmm... Skyscraper I Love You (Jam Scraper)

 

Thirty Five Minutes Of Ambient/ Folk Guitar Instrumentals

Not the catchiest title for a Sunday mix perhaps. The photo is of the Mediterranean Sea, taken from the beach near Nerja in the summer. As Storm Austen batters its way round the UK I can't help but think I'd much rather be in Spain. 

This mix came together via a post over The Swede's blog featuring a folk guitarist called Henry Parker whose EP The Dark Peak is a set of contemporary folk instrumentals on acoustic guitar inspired by the Peak District. The song Eowestre Clough sent me back to the Bert Jansch album Avocet, a 1979 set of acoustic guitar folk instrumentals, that I also picked up on via The Swede's blog, Unthought Of, Though, Somehow.

Playing the two tracks back to back led me to the rest of the set, thirty five minutes of guitar based, folk and ambient tunes, mainly from recent releases but with Bert Jansch opening it with a song from his 1979 album Avocet. I meant to include a Thurston Moore instrumental but forgot. Sorry Thurston. 

Thirty Five Minutes Of Ambient/ Folk Guitar Instrumentals

• Bert Jansch: Kingfisher
• Henry Parker: Eowestre Clough
• Andy Bell and Masal: Tidal Love Conversations In That Familiar Golden Orchard
• Kieran Hebden and William Tyler: Secret City
• Jamie Lidell and Luke Schneider: The Story of Your Life
• Robin Guthrie: Coming Up For Air
• Sewell And The Gong: Patron Saint Of Elsewhere

Avocet came out in 1979, Bert Jansch at his best with an album of instrumentals inspired by British birds- all the song titles are named after birds, Kingfisher, Kittiwake, Lapwing, Bittern, Osprey and the twenty minute title track Avocet. Danny Thompson plays bass and is a huge presence throughout and Martin Jenkins plays fiddle. It's a bit of a late 70s gem, totally out of step with everything going on in 1978 and 1979 and in a way is timeless as a result. Much of it sounds like it could have been recorded at any point between the 1960s and this year. 

Henry Parker's The Dark Peak was new to me until this week and I've been playing catch up ever since. Sadly the vinyl is long since sold out so the digital will have to do for the time being. The Peak District is a place we visit fairly regularly, the national park between here and Sheffield. Parker captured some field recordings out in the Peak in March 2025 including some of the birds that Bert Jansch was writing about. The EP is a solo tribute to the moors and the wildlife and those wild, solitary places. You can listen/ buy here. 

Andy Bell and Masal have an album out this year, an ambient/ psychedelic work called Common Primitives. A previous one, Tidal Love Numbers, came out in 2023. Both have been compiled into a double disc vinyl set recently on Sonic Cathedral. Andy brings his guitar and Masal bring their analogue synths and harp. Tidal Love Conversation In That familiar Golden Orchard is from Tidal Love Numbers- mesmeric, folk/ ambient crossed with cosmic jazz. 

Kieran Hebden and William Tyler's 41 Longfield Street Late 80s came out last year, one of 2025's most listened to albums round here. William's guitar playing and Kieran's laptop and production in a Yin Yang situation. Spider Ballad is the final song from the album, a collision of synth drones, acoustic guitars and noise. 

Modular synth player and tape experimenter Jamie Lidell and Nashville pedal steel guitarist Luke Schneider released A Companion For The Spaces Between Dreams a year ago, experimental instrumental psychedelia born from their discussions about creating a soundtrack for Lidell's own ketamine therapy sessions. Luke's pedal steel guitar is a wonky delight on this track, the notes bending and shifting deliriously. Inner voyage music

Robin Guthrie's Bandcamp page is a treasure trove of tracks he left off other albums or which never saw the light of day for whatever reason. He's released two beauties this year, Cherokee and Coming Up For Air- the latter is on this mix, a gliding, sparkling piece of ambient/ post- Cocteaus shoegaze guitar music from 2015. 

A year ago I was deeply into Sewell And The Gong's Patron Saint Of Elsewhere, a seven track album of pastoral, cosmic, Balearic folk that still sounds as fresh a year later as it did last autumn. 

It is my wife's birthday, fifty five today. Happy birthday Lou. x