Oblique Strategies: ideas for creative lateral thinking

Oblique Strategies is a list of ideas to help break creative blocks by encouraging lateral thinking.

• Abandon normal instruments

• Accept advice

• Accretion

• A line has two sides

• Allow an easement (an easement is the abandonment of a stricture)

• Are there sections? Consider transitions

• Ask people to work against their better judgement

• Ask your body

• Assemble some of the instruments in a group and treat the group

• Balance the consistency principle with the inconsistency principle

• Be dirty

• Breathe more deeply

• Bridges -build -burn

• Cascades

• Change instrument roles

• Change nothing and continue with immaculate consistency

• Children's voices -speaking -singing

• Cluster analysis

• Consider different fading systems

• Consult other sources -promising -unpromising

• Convert a melodic element into a rhythmic element

• Courage!

• Cut a vital connection

• Decorate, decorate

• Define an area as `safe' and use it as an anchor

• Destroy -nothing -the most important thing

• Discard an axiom

• Disconnect from desire

• Discover the recipes you are using and abandon them

• Distorting time

• Do nothing for as long as possible

• Don't be afraid of things because they're easy to do

• Don't be frightened of cliches

• Don't be frightened to display your talents

• Don't break the silence

• Don't stress one thing more than another

• Do something boring

• Do the washing up

• Do the words need changing?

• Do we need holes?

• Emphasize differences

• Emphasize repetitions

• Emphasize the flaws

• Faced with a choice, do both (given by Dieter Roth)

• Feedback recordings into an acoustic situation

• Fill every beat with something

• Get your neck massaged

• Ghost echoes

• Give the game away

• Give way to your worst impulse

• Go slowly all the way round the outside

• Honor thy error as a hidden intention

• How would you have done it?

• Humanize something free of error

• Imagine the music as a moving chain or caterpillar

• Imagine the music as a set of disconnected events

• Infinitesimal gradations

• Intentions -credibility of -nobility of -humility of

• Into the impossible

• Is it finished?

• Is there something missing?

• Is the tuning appropriate?

• Just carry on

• Left channel, right channel, centre channel

• Listen in total darkness, or in a very large room, very quietly

• Listen to the quiet voice

• Look at a very small object, look at its centre

• Look at the order in which you do things

• Look closely at the most embarrassing details and amplify them

• Lowest common denominator check -single beat -single note -single

• riff

• Make a blank valuable by putting it in an exquisite frame

• Make an exhaustive list of everything you might do and do the last thing on the list

• Make a sudden, destructive unpredictable action; incorporate

• Mechanicalize something idiosyncratic

• Mute and continue

• Only one element of each kind

• (Organic) machinery

• Overtly resist change

• Put in earplugs

• Remember those quiet evenings

• Remove ambiguities and convert to specifics

• Remove specifics and convert to ambiguities

• Repetition is a form of change

• Reverse

• Short circuit (example: a man eating peas with the idea that they will improve his virility shovels them straight into his lap)

• Shut the door and listen from outside

• Simple subtraction

• Spectrum analysis

• Take a break

• Take away the elements in order of apparent non-importance

• Tape your mouth (given by Ritva Saarikko)

• The inconsistency principle

• The tape is now the music

• Think of the radio

• Tidy up

• Trust in the you of now

• Turn it upside down

• Twist the spine

• Use an old idea

• Use an unacceptable color

• Use fewer notes

• Use filters

• Use "unqualified" people

• Water

• What are you really thinking about just now? Incorporate

• What is the reality of the situation?

• What mistakes did you make last time?

• What would your closest friend do?

• What wouldn't you do?

• Work at a different speed

• You are an engineer

• You can only make one dot at a time

• You don't have to be ashamed of using your own ideas

• [blank white card]

Credit:

• Created by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt; first published in 1975.

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_Strategies

• https://carinelallemand.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/enoobliqstrat1.pdf

• http://music.hyperreal.org/artists/brian_eno/obliques.html

• https://joeribollaerts.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/brianeno_obliquestrategies1.pdf