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 You can only make one dot at a time. 

This made me start joining the dots between One Dove and Dot Allison, Arab Strap, Wire and Dot Dash, Ry Lichtenstein, The Jam and Pete Wylie and Ariadne's Labyrinth. From the wider Bagging Area community came these dots- C with Angines de Poitrine, Ernie with The Blue Aeroplanes ...And Stones, Al G and Jonathan Richman and Vincent van Gogh, Craig with Hot Chip's Over And Over, Noone and Les Rallizes Denudes, Rol and The Teardrop Explodes, the Swede with The Beat and Ranking Full Stop, Walter with !!! and Chris ZenArcade with some lysergic dots and E.D. 209's Metre and that Robocop sample...

This week's Oblique Strategy card is this- A very small object. It's centre.

My knowledge of physics is fairly limited. Last year a friend lent me Carlo Rovelli's Helgoland,a  very readable account of the story of quantum physics. I still couldn't explain even in the simplest terms much about quantum physics but I enjoyed the ride. 

I do know that atoms are extremely small and are the basic particles that make up everything. At the centre of an atom is the nucleus (which must therefore be smaller than an atom- right?). Atoms are so small we cannot see them, a million times smaller than the breadth of a hair. Coincidentally (and I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that nothing about this series is coincidental, it all seems to be connected), earlier this week I was wandering around the campus at Manchester University where I photographed the Humanities building, a rectangle of concrete opened in 1970. It is the picture at the top of this post. It is just round the corner from the Rutherford Building, which contains the room in which in 1917 Ernest Rutherford split the atom* and so created the modern field of nuclear physics (I once went on a course in the exact room where Rutherford made his discovery). 

Sixty seven years later, also in Manchester, Factory Records released FAC 102, Atom Rock by Quando Quango.

Atom Rock

Quando Quango were a dance act somewhat ahead of their time, Mike Pickering channeling electronic music from New York and Chicago into mid- 80s Manchester along with Gonnie and Reinier Rietveld. They formed in Rotterdam in 1980 and then relocated to Manchester in '82 when the Hacienda opened. Mike Pickering's role in modern Manchester and Factory cannot be overplayed. 

Atom Rock is a light on its feet slice of 1984, pioneering dance music with jazz and Latin influences worn on its sleeves, produced by Be Music (Bernard Sumner and Donald Johnson of ACR). That jangly, funky guitar riff is a moonlighting Johnny Marr (the birth of Electronic, Marr and Sumner's late 80s band, is this record). It's one of those songs that made Factory such an interesting record label in the mid- 80s. 'Fela Kuti meets Kraftwerk somewhere between Rotterdam and Manchester', said Gonnie of the band's sound. 

A year later there was a Mark Kamins remix, Kamins putting his Roland 808 through its paces (Kamins was the man who launched Madonna)...

Atom Rock (Mark Kamins New York Remix)

Juan Moreno's Atomism Theory came out in 2024, an eight minute ambient piece that actually sounds like it could be the sound of atomic particles and nuclear fission.

Atomism Theory

And in a nice link to Carlo Rovelli's Helgoland, in 2009 Massive Attack released Heligoland (both named after the same piece of land, an archipelago in Germany). The first single from the album was Splitting The Atom, with Horace Andy on co- vocals and Damon Albarn on keys. 

Splitting The Atom

I have several other atom/ atomic songs but I'll stop there. Feel free to split your own atoms in the comments box or make any other responses to the Oblique Strategy card- A very small object. It's centre.

* Apparently 'splitting the atom' is a poor choice of words for what Rutherford actually did. The University of Manchester's website says that Rutherford was ''the first person to create an artificial nuclear reaction... now described as 'splitting the atom' in popular accounts''

N'Sel Fik

My recent interest in things Moroccan/ North African and my longstanding love of Factory Records come together today in a post to end the week. In 1987 Factory released a record by Fadela, a 7" and 12" single (Fac 197) a song called N'Sel Fik- a fusion of synthpop and rai. It's always felt like a bit of an outlier in the Factory back catalogue (a label with enough outliers to be going on with, one which would happily release a single on a whim if one of the key movers at the label liked it enough). 

N'Sel Fik 

The version I have here is a shorter one than the Factory release, four minutes as opposed to seven one (and there was also a three minute promo version for radio stations). In 1987 Factory also put out True Faith and Touched By The Hand Of God by New Order, the NO compilation Substance, 24 Hour Party People by Happy Mondays, and a slew of singles by Miaow, ACR, The Railway Children, Kalima, Biting Tongues and Durutti Column. N'Sel Fik sounds nothing like any of these.

Fadela were a married couple, Chaba Fadela and Cheb Sahraoui. The song was one of the first rai recordings to be widely released in Europe. Factory licensed it from Parisian label Attitude who originally put it out in 1986. I've long wondered how and why it came about and with a little bit of internet sleuthing found out the following...

Mike Pickering, Hacienda DJ, Factory A&R and recording artist (Quando Quango) heard it being played in the Harem club in New York, a club run by Mark Kamins (an NY legend who helped shape the city's club culture and sound in the 70s and 80s and who played an instrumental role in launching Madonna's career). Kamins had a lot of Eastern/ Turkish/ North African influences going on at harem. He'd have Turkish musicians playing live while he spun early house records. M/A/R/R/S came down one night with a white label of Pump Up The Volume and Mark mixed the vocal of an Egyptian singer into it- M/A/R/R/S went back to London and sampled the voice for the final cut of their single.Harem became hip and Kamins shut it down a year later after New Order played there. 

If you want a much more detailed post about the story of Fadela and N'Sel Fik this blog, Hawgblawg, can fill you in. It's written by a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Arkansas who has published a book on the Palestinian Revolt of the 1930s.

Mike Pickering was so taken with N'Sel Fik he took a copy back to Manchester and told Tony Factory should license and release it with a Pickering remix. It's not an easy or especially cheap record to track down now- I have it on the Palatine box set but have never found a copy of the single on either 7" or 12". The hunt is all part of the fun though. 

Drop That Ghettoblaster

Something a bit more in your face and full on, full frontal even, than yesterday's ghostly Rootmasters song. This 1986 release by Karen Finley was sampled by S'Express (where this post's title was borrowed from and also the phrase 'suck me off', which somehow Mark Moore managed to disguise slightly by smudging the first vowel sound and then sneaking onto Radio 1 and Top of Of The Pops). Over a rapid fire drum machine and then some long keyboard chords Karen opens fire (Karen was a performance artist and poet and is currently a professor at New York University). She starts out with 'you don't own me bastard, you fucking asshole' and then crams in pretty much every insult, sexual reference and swear word she can think of, also taking time to include your Granny and Belgian waffles. It's a tour de force performance and was produced and co-written by Mark Kamins (who most famously worked with Madonna in the 80s).

It is still pretty jaw-dropping to hear and should probably only be played loudly/audibly if you are very confident in those who are around you. Most definitely Not Safe For Work.

Tales Of Taboo

Here, so you can place those vocal samples in context, and also because this is one of the greatest records of the 1980s (and of any decade in fact) are S'Express having a lot of fun on Top Of The Pops.