I hope you all had a good weekend.
I have written a ton of music in my life and have had some great success in getting my vision translated into music. Having said that, it is NOT easy to sit down and write a song every time you try. I have hit the writing block wall many, many times and in the past if I could not break through the wall I would put the song on the shelf to sit and get dusty.
A few years ago things changed...My pal Dave told me about (then made me a set!) a set of cards that Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt put together called the oblique strategy cards. Each card contains a phrase or cryptic remark which can be used to break a deadlock or dilemma situation. All I can say is that they have helped get through some pretty thick walls! I keep them in the desk in my studio and if I have run out of ideas I pick one card out of the stack and follow the cryptic message. They have messages like, 'Honour thy error as a hidden intention' or 'State the problem in words as clearly as possible' and so on... ....
I have included an interview that Brian did and a link for you all.
Happy day.....
Hamish.....
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Eno discusses the Oblique Strategies at greatest length in an interview with Charles Amirkhanian, conducted at KPFA in Berkeley in early 1980:....
'These cards evolved from our separate working procedures. It was one of the many cases during the friendship that he [Peter Schmidt] and I where we arrived at a working position at almost exactly the same time and almost in exactly the same words. There were times when we hadn't seen each other for a few months at a time sometimes, and upon remeeting or exchanging letters, we would find that we were in the same intellectual position - which was quite different from the one we'd been in prior to that. ....
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.....
http://music.hyperreal.org/artists/brian_eno/oblique/oblique.html