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 suggestion was Breathe more deeply.
My responses were some deeply heavy dub techno from Basic Channel and Deanne Day's Hardly Breathe, Weatherall and Harrow mid- 90s deep house/ techno. Both encouraging deeper breathing. The Oblique Saturdays crowd made some excellent and varied suggestions- Blu Cantrelle's Breath, Kylie's Breathe, Warren Zevon's French Inhaler, Thandi Ntuli and Carlos Nino's experimental breathing, Kate Bush, Serge and Jane engaging in deeper and heavier breathing, Massive Attack's Teardrop and Aggelein by Valium. Thank you Jake, Khayem, Rol, Ernie, Jase, Iggy, Walter and Scaley Pecker for your contributions. Here's Kylie from 1998 with a song that as Scaley observed has a touch of William Orbit's Ray Of Light production about it.
This week's card say this- Abandon normal instruments.
Eno was surely a man who would gladly abandon normal instruments. At first I thought about Einsturzende Neubauten, Blixa Bargeld and co. using homemade instruments constructed from scrap metal and tools, wielding angle grinders, hammers and metal plates and with jackhammers drilling through the stage at the ICA. This is Kollaps, eight minutes of industrial and experimental sounds from West Berlin in 1981...
I also remembered Jagz Kooner and Gary Burns describing Sabres Of Paradise recording what would become Sabresonic in London in 1993 and they mic'ed up Gary banging a scaffolding pole with a wrench and shaking a tray of matches to create the drum and percussion sounds for Smokebelch.
Back in October 1988 I went to a gig at Liverpool Royal Court, a triple bill headlined by Billy Bragg with support from Michelle Shocked. The first act on the bill were The Beatnigs, a San Francisco band who combined punk, industrial and hip hop and played the bonnet of a VW Beetle with metal chains, a rotary saw and a grinder. I don't have any Beatnigs recordings but Michael Franti and Rono Tse would go on to become The Disposable Heroes Of Hiphoprisy and reworked one of the songs from Beatnig days in the new band, a hip hop/ spoken word, alt/ industrial classic from 1992.
Television, The Drug Of the Nation
Lastly I thought about Tom Waits and especially 1999's Mule Variations, an album which uses normal instruments- brass, violin, bass, guitars, harp, pump organ and also turntables and samples- but sounds like it was made in a junkyard using bits of metal and old car parts. What's he building in there?
Feel free to abandon normal instruments and give up your suggestions in the comment box
10 comments:
Jeff Easton of the band Split Lip Mayfield played a Gas Tank Bass
Rayfield
A great band from Africa who I've been lucky enough to see live spring to mind.
Nana Benz du Togo have percussion provided by lots of PVC tubing, a suitcase used as a foot drum and ceremonial pots. The only real instrument is a tiny Korg keyboard.
Photo evidence:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/gogginsworld/53892364638/in/album-72177720314177279
And now video:
https://youtu.be/hyTXiThYWRo?si=ODZJR5M8IR5LBVa0
As we once again stand upon the precipice like lemmings, about to leap into the fiercely burning lake of manipulative nationalist lies - simultaneously hateful and false given their exclusionary premise - perhaps it will be next year (around this time), that a new all out world war finally engulfs us.
If it does, that will be a full fifty years since Kraftwerk produced 'Europe Endless', a track which forewarned of latent currents reawakening while showing necessary defiance in its simple repetition of the track's name.
In any case, in its original synth-led form, it is a banger because it succeeds in eliciting a collective resistant joy incomprehensible to drooling morons.
Getting back to this week's card, you might reasonably argue that folk guitarist Shane Parish has done the band's homewerk for them by interpreting the track using only his acoustic.
Here....https://shaneparish.bandcamp.com/album/repertoire?t=8
And this is what what Shane himself had to say about making the track...
"When Florian Schneider from Kraftwerk died in 2020, I made an arrangement of this song for electric guitar and loop pedal and posted it to my Youtube Channel. I was then asked if I could make a solo acoustic version.
I gave it a try. The tuning is BGDGBD, which was my solution to the problem of executing the song’s three key changes while playing in an open tuning. I hope to do more electronic music on acoustic guitar in the future."
In fact, he's since done a number of interesting takes on acts unfamiliar to his commonly understood genre, including a recent album of Autechre covers and you have to admire the ingenuity, so definitely check that out as well.
To close though, if and when Armegeddon does finally arrive, I expect it will be folks like Shane that are leading the revolution and helping us all to survive the third degree burns and idiotic whims of our nihilistic, fuck-pig oppressors.
Great to see Tom Waits in here - I love What's He Building In There?
I'm going to nominate You're Going To Miss Me by the Thirteenth Floor Elevators, which prominently features an "electric jug", played by Tommy Hall who has his own iffypedia page devoted to the fact that he must surely by the most famous jug player ever to live.
This is such an interesting series but I've never been able to think of something to contribute. However, this time, I'm inspired! Spoons! Gotta have spoons. I'd like to nominate 'Sweet Talking Spoon Song' by Split Enz from their more eccentric early output (and any live performances where Noel Crombie performs his inimitable spoon solos. A joy to watch!)
Gruff Rhys’ 2010 collab with Tony da Gatorra spotlights the latter’s invention, the Gatorra - a hybrid guitar / drum machine. A reminder, perhaps, of why we tend to stick with normal instruments
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oucCnYOo-Mw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cmWi0vn5Y4
Some great suggestions here, thanks all.
Swanditch- that is out of this world!
Try this weird and wonderful album
https://matthewherbert.bandcamp.com/album/plat-du-jour
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