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Music

Brian Eno's Self-Help Cards from the 70s Just Got A Twisted Millennial Reboot

'Grotesque Tables ii' makes 50 anagrams out of the original 113 oblique strategies.
Photo courtesy of Warp Records

Back in 1975, Brian Eno and German-British artist Peter Schmidt teamed up to create a series of cards titled Oblique Strategies that offered ways to break out of creative blocks. Over 40-years later, someone finally had the bright idea to create a series of anagrams based on the cards.

Grotesque Tables II, itself an anagram of Oblique Strategies, are now available through a website created by New York based artist and conceptual musician Noah Wall. Taking 50 of the original 113 strategies, Wall reworked these helpful ideas into blissful abstractions. The results of his work are pretty wild, altering Eno and Schmidt's suggestions such as "Use filters" and "Breathe more deeply" and "Be less critical more often," into wonderfully bizarre phrases like "Let fissure" and "Elope by mere thread," and "Be frictionless latecomer." The cards even come with a Eno-approved blurb: "Let the Oblique Strategies fissure into a million wonderful variants, of which this is the first."

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You can scope examples below and read more about and purchase the cards here, which includes a spoiler key of what anagrams match to which strategies. Eno currently has a new album The Ship, which includes a 21-minute opening track. Wall's previous work includes an album recorded entirely (and covertly) at Guitar Center.