Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt printed their collection of oblique strategies — aphorisms for creativity — on cards in 1975:
- (Organic) machinery
- A line has two sides
- A very small object — Its centre
- Abandon desire
- Abandon normal instructions
- Accept advice
- Accretion
- Adding on
- Allow an easement (an easement is the abandonment of a stricture)
- Always first steps
- Always give yourself credit for having more than personality
- Always the first steps
- Are there sections? Consider transitions
- Ask people to work against their better judgement
- Ask your body
- Assemble some of the elements in a group and treat the group
- Back up a few steps. What else could you have done?
- Balance the consistency principle with the inconsistency principle
- Be dirty
- Be extravagant
- Be less critical more often
- Breathe more deeply
- Bridges — build — burn
- Call your mother and ask her what to do.
- Cascades
- Change ambiguities to specifics
- Change instrument roles
- Change nothing and continue with immaculate consistency
- Change specifics to ambiguities
- Children’s voices — speaking — singing
- Cluster analysis
- Consider different fading systems
- Consider transitions
- 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
- Describe the landscape in which this belongs.
- Destroy nothing; Destroy the most important thing
- Discard an axiom
- Disciplined self-indulgence
- Disconnect from desire
- Discover the recipes you are using and abandon them
- Discover your formulas and abandon them
- Display your talent
- Distorting time
- Do nothing for as long as possible
- Do something boring
- Do something sudden, destructive and unpredictable
- Do the last thing first
- Do the washing up
- Do the words need changing?
- Do we need holes?
- Don’t avoid what is easy
- 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
- Emphasize differences
- Emphasize repetitions
- Emphasize the flaws
- Faced with a choice, do both
- Feed the recording back out of the medium
- Feedback recordings into an acoustic situation
- Fill every beat with something
- Find a safe part and use it as an anchor
- First work alone, then work in unusual pairs.
- From nothing to more than nothing
- Get your neck massaged
- Ghost echoes
- Give the game away
- Give way to your worst impulse
- Go outside. Shut the door.
- Go slowly all the way round the outside
- Go to an extreme, move back to a more comfortable place
- How would someone else do it?
- How would you explain this to your parents?
- How would you have done it?
- Humanize something that is free of error.
- Idiot glee
- Imagine the music as a moving chain or caterpillar
- Imagine the music as a series of disconnected events
- In total darkness, or in a very large room, very quietly
- Infinitesimal gradations
- Instead of changing the thing, change the world around it.
- Intentions — credibility of — nobility of — humility of
- Into the impossible
- Is it finished?
- Is something missing?
- Is the intonation correct?
- Is the style right?
- Is the tuning appropriate?
- Is the tuning intonation correct?
- Is there something missing?
- It is quite possible (after all)
- It is simply a matter or work
- Just carry on
- Left channel, right channel, centre channel
- List the qualities it has. List those you’d like.
- 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.
- Lost in useless territory
- Lowest common denominator check — single beat — single note — single riff
- Magnify the most difficult details
- Make a blank valuable by putting it in an exquisite frame
- Make a sudden, destructive unpredictable action; incorporate
- Make an exhaustive list of everything you might do and do the last thing on the list
- Make it more sensual
- Make what’s perfect more human
- Mechanize something idiosyncratic
- Move towards the unimportant
- Mute and continue
- Not building a wall but making a brick
- Once the search has begun, something will be found
- Only a part, not the whole
- Only one element of each kind
- Overtly resist change
- Pae White’s non-blank graphic metacard
- Pay attention to distractions
- Picture of a man spotlighted
- Put in earplugs
- Question the heroic approach
- Remember those quiet evenings
- Remove a restriction
- Remove ambiguities and convert to specifics
- Remove specifics and convert to ambiguities
- Remove the middle, extend the edges
- Repetition is a form of change
- Retrace your steps
- Revaluation (a warm feeling)
- 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
- Simply a matter of work
- Slow preparation, fast execution
- Spectrum analysis
- State the problem in words as simply as possible
- Steal a solution.
- Take a break
- Take away as much mystery as possible. What is left?
- Take away the elements in order of apparent non-importance
- Take away the important parts
- Tape your mouth
- The inconsistency principle
- The most important thing is the thing most easily forgotten
- The tape is now the music
- Think — inside the work — outside the work
- Think of the radio
- Tidy up
- Towards the insignificant
- Trust in the you of now
- Try faking it
- Turn it upside down
- Twist the spine
- Use “unqualified” people.
- Use an old idea
- Use an unacceptable color
- Use cliches
- Use fewer notes
- Use filters
- Use something nearby as a model
- Use your own ideas
- Voice your suspicions
- Water
- What are the sections sections of? Imagine a caterpillar moving
- What context would look right?
- What do you do? Now, what do you do best?
- What else is this like?
- What is the reality of the situation?
- What is the simplest solution?
- What mistakes did you make last time?
- What most recently impressed you? How is it similar? What can you learn from it? What could you take from it?
- What to increase? What to reduce? What to maintain?
- What were the branch points in the evolution of this entity
- What were you really thinking about just now? Incorporate
- What would make this really successful?
- What would your closest friend do?
- What wouldn’t you do?
- When is it for? Who is it for?
- Where is the edge?
- Which parts can be grouped?
- Who would make this really successful?
- Work at a different speed
- Would anyone want it?
- 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
- Your mistake was a hidden intention
Here Brian Eno discusses the cards:
Eno emphasizes that the list isn’t helpful; you need to be surprised by drawing a random strategy.