here & now

In case you were wondering where the title or the admittedly rather obscure subtitles throughout our new issue with Brian Eno come from, they were all taken from the wonderful project Oblique Strategies by Eno and the artist Peter Schmidt, conceived in 1974 as a simple deck of cards offering simple advice in case of a ‘creative block’. Functioning similar to Tarot cards, the idea is that a random answer to a specific question might just nudge you in the right direction of approaching an issue from a different and unexpected angle. Whether it works or not presumably depends on many things, but in themselves, the cards are nothing short of pure poetry. Hear Eno talk to Jarvis Cocker about the Strategies here, or simply order your own set here. Alternatively, there are several sites who have created a digital random version of Oblique Strategies, for instance here.