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 In total darkness, or a very large room, very quietly.

I responded with bands I'd seen in large rooms- Lou Reed, Nick Cave, The Charlatans, Bob Dylan, Beastie Boys and Prince, and also with Jamie Xx and John Talabot. 

The Oblique Saturdays community chipped in with Gram Parsons, The Deep Dark Woods, Fatima Mansions, Cave In, Rage Against The Machine, The Youngbloods, Bonnie Prince Billy, Idlewild, Pauline Murray and the Invisible Girls, The Twilight Sad and The Durutti Column. Thanks to Ernie, Rol, Chris Yardley, Al G and Mrs G, SRC, C, JC and Eddie Largely Anonymous. 

This is Pauline Murray and The Invisible Girls in 1980, Martin Hannett on production, Vini Reilly in the band and Peter Saville on sleeve art. 

Screaming In The Darkness

This week's card says this- Get your neck massaged.

I mused on this for a while and came up with nothing much.  I decided to engage my housemates (wife and daughter) into the Oblique Saturdays world and said to them, 'I'm going to say a phrase and I want you to tell me what song or songs it suggests.' They responded as follows-

Wife- 'Nothing'

Daughter- 'Nothing'

Wife- 'Stress'.

Stress Waves

Oneohtrix Point Never in 2010. If you're stressed it's good to try to find ways to relax. Here come Frankie...

Relax (Sex Mix)

Listening to relaxing music helps too, especially music with a vocal sampled from a relaxation tape. Maybe Love Corporation can assist. 

Palatial 

Feel free to drop your own responses to Get your neck massaged into the comments box. 

Post script: Spencer sent this to me earlier this week. I'm adding it here as an Oblique Saturday extra. It's from an interview Brian Eno gave in 1980

'The Oblique Strategies evolved from me being in a number of working situations when the panic of the situation - particularly in studios - tended to make me quickly forget that there were others ways of working and that there were tangential ways of attacking problems that were in many senses more interesting than the direct head-on approach. If you're in a panic, you tend to take the head-on approach because it seems to be the one that's going to yield the best results. Of course, that often isn't the case - it's just the most obvious and - apparently - reliable method. The function of the Oblique Strategies was, initially, to serve as a series of prompts which said, "Don't forget that you could adopt *this* attitude," or "Don't forget you could adopt *that* attitude." 

The first Oblique Strategy said "Honour thy error as a hidden intention." And, in fact, Peter's first Oblique Strategy - done quite independently and before either of us had become conscious that the other was doing that - was ...I think it was "Was it really a mistake?" which was, of course, much the same kind of message. Well, I collected about fifteen or twenty of these and then I put them onto cards. At the same time, Peter had been keeping a little book of messages to himself as regards painting, and he'd kept those in a notebook. We were both very surprised to find the other not only using a similar system but also many of the messages being absolutely overlapping, you know...there was a complete correspondence between the messages. So subsequently we decided to try to work out a way of making that available to other people, which we did; we published them as a pack of cards, and they're now used by quite a lot of different people, I think.''

Nocturnal Stealth Mode

Techno albums as tributes to much loved cats are thin on the ground- the genre has been expanded a little by the release last week of The Adventures Of An Amazing Boy Cat by M- Paths, out on Mighty Force. Across thirteen tracks M- Paths explores the range of electronic sound- techno, drum 'n' bass, ambient and vocal samples, all expertly brought together into a whole. 

The first track is just seven seconds long, the cat of the album's title saying 'hello'. It's followed by M- Paths revisiting his own Emotivated track, a Kennedy sampling track from December 2025, the former President's, 'we do these things not because they are easy but because they are hard', speech accompanied by headspinning electronic melodies and thumpy techno. The eight minute Forever In Our Hearts is a centrepiece, a vocal sample FXed and chopped up and laid over sleek, gliding Berlin techno. On Boy Cat's Nocturnal Stealth Mode the drums get tougher and distorted, dub space and scratchy synths sounds competing with more cut up vocals, sometimes not much more than syllables and parts of words dropped in. 

Sirens arrives, disruptive and in your face with rapid fire drums and speaker bothering bass. Towards the end of the album Climbing rides in on a machine rhythm and skittering synth FX that dance across the top, layers of sounds repeating as snares fire off and clatter away. Climbing (Part 2) brings the drum 'n' bass drums back with more sampled speaking voices and intense synth squiggles. At the end Play & Rest calms things down with some ambient techno chords (briefly) before the drums kick in. After a couple of minutes, the drums disappear, the ambient chords resurface and then it fades to static and the sound of waves hitting a pebbled shore. A most satisfying ending. 

The album can be found at Mighty Force here.

Nayar

Four years ago Tigerbalm released an album called International Love Affair, a record in love with the possibility of sounds from other places, a trans- continental dance record combining London with Bali, Africa, New Zealand, Brazil and Morocco- house music and global sounds jammed together in a completely organic sounding way by Tigerbalm (Rose Robinson). Apart from anything else, it was a massively fun album. Riad De Lister sounds like Tom Tom Club pitching up at a 21st century basement party in Dalston. 

Riad De Lister

A remix album followed with new versions by a slew of artists including The Emperor Machine taking on Riad De Lister and then by way of return Tigerbalm remixed The Emperor Machine on an EP of tracks from his Island Boogie album (that also included a pair of Hardway Bros remixes). Tigerbalm's remix of La Cassette with Severine Mouletin on vocals, is day glo, sci fi/ Afro- pop, dub disco. Impossible not to enjoy. 

La Cassette (Tigerbalm Remix)

Between that release and this autumn I lost touch with Tigerbalm's music but found it again recently. By happy coincidence Tigerbalm released an album in June this year, Bubblegum Discos, that opens with this infectious and vibrant piece of futuristic Latin/ synth pop, Nayar (recorded with Napoli resident Giorgio Lopez). 

Nayar originally out as a single in July 2025 and was followed by two more singles- Pura Vida and then Coco Makako. Those and the rest of Bubblegum Discos can be heard/ bought here. 

Queer The Pitch

Rich Thair has a main job in Red Snapper, a role as a member of Sabres Of Paradise live band, a spin off duo with Sabres bassist Nick Abnett (Spraycan) and a Red Snapper offshoot called Number with his long term musical partner Ali Friend. You'd think all of this would keep him busy enough but he also has a solo project, Dicky Continental, based out of his studio Buntys in Swansea. Dicky blurs trip hop, dub, soul and breakbeats, an urban and after hours sound. The first album Un... came out on Acid Jazz in 2023. Last year he had a track on Sounds From The Flightpath Etstae Volume 2 and this year has released a single and been involved in some remixes, all leading up to a new album, Queer The Pitch. 

Queer The Pitch came out recently on Margate label Ramrock. Dicky reunites with singer/ songwriter Jo Sims (from Un...) on opening song The Grain, an echoey, breakbeat affair with crunchy drums and an acoustic guitar, and vocals that drift in and out. It works very well as a lead in and sets up what comes next. Across the rest of the ten tracks that make up the album Rich provides the musical backdrop for a range of young vocalists, singers, rappers and poets- Tia Zakura, Ioan Omar, Laila Woodward and Asher Carroll, drawn from a local youth project and talent pool Rich leads called Future Blood. 

Tia Zakura's laid back, easy delivery doesn't hide the personal nature and unsettling feel of the words- Rust is coming from an uneasy place, examining the world and Tia's place in it, being young and black in 2026 Britain. 'Thoughts drive me insane so I've just been thinking thinking', she says on Rust. Tia returns on the summer single Hostile Environment, a fantastic dub/ blues spoken word/ poetry track. 

Big Red Button marries live jazz and trip hop with Ioan Omar's voice. His voice is also on the fractured hip hop of It Was Just You and the synth bass and electric piano, soulful sounds of Flying. Asher Carroll sings on Take A Deep Breath And Let Go, a cinematic song that suggests a world of underground clubs and basement cafes. On Yeah We Do there are seagulls and a long horn note, drums and the voice of Laila Woodward, who brings a folk/ ambient hypnosis and haunting to Queer The Pitch. 'Save your soul for another day', she advises. 

Pirate Love arrives halfway through Queer The Pitch, a tribute to pirate radio with fuzz bass, strings, FX and a rare groove radio sample, and the alubm finishes with Sweet Equity, a late night jazz/ blues track, more cinematic sounds with bass by Andrew Wal Coughlan, to whom the album is dedicated. 

Rich has pulled off something really special on Queer The Pitch, a showcase for some young and emerging talents- singers, songwriters, rappers and poets- whose voices and words find a home in and among the experimental and evocative tracks Rich has created as Dicky Continental- 21st century, South Wales, dub/ spoken word blues. 

You can find Queer The Pitch at Ramrock's Bandcamp page and at Dicky Continental's website. 

Luster

Back in April 2025 4AD released an album by Irish musician and songwriter Maria Somerville, an album called Luster. At the time I slept on it a little, not giving it the time it deserved (despite a couple of people raving about it to me. Then, about a year ago I caught up and became mildly obsessed with it. Now, a year on I go back to it every now and then and find something new in it every time. 

Maria is from Connemara, Ireland, and picked up singing and playing guitar at an early age from family members. She uploaded some songs in 2013 and got some attention and then self released her debut in 2018. She got a show on NTS radio (a station who are very on the ball with leftfield and non- mainstream music, DJs and selectors) and she would weave field recordings and spoken word tracks into her selections of folk, ambient, shoegaze and dreampop. This in turn seems to have fed into Luster, an album which found its way to the right home with 4AD. 

In just under forty minutes Maria pulls together the sounds mentioned above- folk, ambient, shoegaze, dreampop- with some seriously emotive and affecting music, songs that have an indefinable quality but that also speak straight to you. Most of them, I don't know what they're about as such, but I feel as if I know exactly what she means. 

There's something mythical about the songs on Luster, something otherwordly and in tune wiht the elements and nature. Halo sounds like its coming in from out at sea, drifting in on a sea mist- a gauze of drones and FX and an unseen choir, an abstract ambient/ shoegaze sound that the words seem to appear out of and then disappear into. 

Halo

On Trip the metal strings of the guitar chords clang away, coming roughly through the amplifier and an Irish folk influence is there, part of the vocal melody, a nod to the past. 

Trip

Monday's Long Songs

Walking in the woods and meadows round the River Mersey is one of our local rituals. There are a some well worn paths and across on the other side of the river the Riverbank Cafe, set up during lockdown and still thriving today. The sausage rolls are highly recommended. But if you stray off the path a little and head down towards the Urmston part of the meadows there's a maze of tracks and paths that wind their way round a couple of riding centres, fields with horses and semi- derelict caravans and a farm. It was walking down there a few weeks ago that we came across this entrance to a half submerged chamber. 

No, of course I didn't go in. We all know how those films finish. Makes you wonder though. 

A pair of Monday long song releases for your enjoyment today, one from Brighton and from San Francisco via Leeds. Brighton DJ and producer Gordon Kaye has been playing and making music since the mid- 80s. This year he's released three singles- Galactic Ride and Garbage In Garbage Out were the first two, now joined by a third, Something Real. 

Something Real is the pick of the bunch for me, an eight minute long cosmic chugger, synths and drum machine providing a deeply addictive acid house/ sci fi backdrop to the dreamy vocals (courtesy of Gordon's daughter Gabriella, singing of neon planets and silver shadows, midnight rhythms and laser rays). A piece of summer sounding psychedelic Balearica for October. Get it at Bandcamp.

Over at Paisley Dark Marshall Watson has an EP out, Tougher Than Disco, two new tracks and four remixes. Never Coming Down is eight minutes of slo mo, acidic chug with echo drenched voices low in the mix. The remixes come from L.A. Dysto who pitch up the beats and the tension and Mr B.C. who brings the warp factor and delay- and then the big chords. 

The second track is Mesmerise, seven minutes of acid house hypnosis led by a post- punk/ indie bass guitar, some spacey synth notes and a trippy vocal from Alona. Remixes are by Viper Patrol (stripped down and thumpy) and Airsine (machine funk). Find all six tracks at Paisley Dark's Bandcamp page. 

Forty Minutes Of Richard Norris And Friends

Richard Norris has a prodigious work rate, a seemingly endless source of musical creativity and productivity. This year alone he has continued his monthly deep listening Music For Healing series (a pair of twenty minute ambient pieces released on the 1st of the month, themed for 2026 around patterns), release a double album of remixes, a solo album inspired by Super 8 home movie footage, an album with Lol Hammond as Moon Dust, an ambient album with Mark Barrott (Nocturnes Vol. 1) and a track released on Martin Luther King Day in January called The Corn Is Coming. There are still two and a half months of 2026 to go- there could be much more to come. 

This is a forty minute mix, a selection of tracks from some of those releases, that starts out ambient and picks up the pace into dub and Balearic areas. If you aren't already a member, his monthly subscription means that most of this music drops into your digital world throughout the year and often comes through your letterbox as well in physical formats. You can find all of this and more at Richard's Bandcamp. 

Forty Minutes Of Richard Norris in 2026

• Richard Norris: River's Song
• Richard Norris: Nocturne No. 6
• Moon Dust: Scarlet Traces
• Moon Dust: Wide Open Space
• Katy J Pearson: Willow's Song (Richard Norris Ritual Mix)
• Gulp: Wildflower (Richard Norris Remix)
• Hollow Hand: Before Tomorrow (Richard Norris Avalon Remix)
• Warpaint: Disco// Very (Richard Norris Remix)

River's Song  came out as a single back in May ahead of the 8mm album, a wobbly and affecting piece of hauntology, inspired by 8mm cine camera films and home movie footage from the pre- digital era. River's Song sounds exactly like watching a flickering film of kids playing in the summer sun, the film clicking as it whirrs round and the past flashing by. Nocturne No. 6 is also from 8mm, a piano piece that uses a different piece of film to spark the music. 8mm is here. 

Moon Dust is Richard and Lol Hammond (Spiral Tribe, The Drum Club). Their album Memories, Dreams, Reflections comes from a similar place as 8mm, thirteen largely piano- led tracks that fall somewhere between ambient, neo- classical and soundtracks. Scarlet Traces is a slow mo, melodic synths and keys track. Wide Open Space is gentle drones, sci fi/ cosmische ambient. You can find Moon Dust's album here. 

Richard's remix work is legendary and cherry picking to compile the highlights onto one album must have been a headache. The remixes on Re- Make: Re- Model go back over a decade with twelve on the vinyl edition and nineteen on CD and download. Narrowing it down to just four remixes for this mix was a problem in itself. The ones I didn't include but easily could have take in Mark Peters and Dot Allison, Pale Blue Eyes, Jagwar Ma, Joe Goddard, Saint Etienne, A Mountain Of One and Andy Bell and there are plenty more as well as those. Re- Make: Remodel is here. 

Richard's dubbed out remix of Katy J Pearson's version of Willow's Song is originally from 2023, a remix of a cover of Paul Giovanni's song from The Wicker Man film, a celebration of the summer solstice, disappearing policemen and pagan goings on. There's a bit of a collision as that track segues into the next one, all my fault I'm afraid.

Gulp are Super Furry Animals Guto Pryce and Lindsey Leven whose album Beneath Strawberry Moons came out last year with Richard's remix on a 12" of Wildflower. Psychedelic folk transported into Balearic- psyche. 

Hollow Hand are from Brighton, a three piece that also play as Caitlin Rose's house band. 60s pop/ indie folk and country rock. Richard re- models them in shimmering  dubby/ folky/ electronic style.

Warpaint's Disco// Very came out in 2014, a track from their self titled 2014 album. Richard's remix is a seven minute floor shaker- I played it at The Golden Lion earlier this year and it hit the late Saturday afternoon/ early evening spot very nicely.