Make a Blank Valuable by Putting it in an Exquisite Frame (and other Oblique Strategies)

I was born on May 15, 1948 in the small town of Melton in Suffolk, England. I studied painting at the nearby Ipswich Civic College and at the Winchester School of Art from 1966-1969. I explored abstract expressionist painting and wrote poetry.

1975. I was walking across a crowded intersection and was struck by a taxi. During my long recovery that lasted for weeks, I was listening to a baroque classical record one afternoon and was attempting to discern the music since it was at a low volume. It was a rainy day. The harp music blended into the background with the rain. I began to wonder. Why is there not more music like this experience? Music that complements whatever environment you are in. Music that is reflective. I will construct a text specifically to assist creativity in myself and artists, musicians, and the public. I will name it Oblique Strategies.

Do Nothing for as Long as Possible.

July 1975. The moon is waning. I am waiting. I am waiting like an empty flower pot. First day- nothing. Second day- nothing. Third day- nothing. Fourth day- nothing.

From Nothing to More than Nothing.

On the fifth day, I scribble down a random series of words (“ching, da da, data, daughter, delphic, doldrums, dumpling, perigee, quantum”) and cut them up and reassemble them. Then I write four lines describing my mental process: “All the clouds turn to words. All the words float in sequence. No one knows what they mean. Everyone just ignores them.” On the sixth day, I convene a group of musicians (John Cale on viola, Rod Melvin on Fender Rhodes, Paul Rudolph on anchor bass, Percy Jones on fretless bass) and myself on “snake” guitar in Island Studios to improvise and rehearse. On the seventh day, we complete “Sky Saw”.

Make a Blank Valuable by Putting It in an Exquisite Frame.

August 7, 1975. It is the night of the new moon. I decide I do not want to write lyrics. I want to draw. I sketch a fairy tale forest with foreboding, gnarled trees. On August 8-9, I draw brigantines, galleons, and schooners setting sail for the high seas on adventures or hopelessly off-course on faraway oceans; a picturesque and quaint English woodland garden in springtime; dinosaurs loping and lumbering in the Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous; silvery mackerel gliding underwater; a tropical volcano. The moon is waxing. I am ready to record. For one week (August 10-16), I record one instrumental each day: “In Dark Trees”, “The Big Ship”, “Another Green World”, “Sombre Reptiles”, “Little Fishes”, “Becalmed”, “Spirits Drifting”. I experiment with bass, Farfisa organ, guitar, Hammond organ, Leslie and prepared piano, Peruvian percussion, rhythm generator, synthesizer. August 17. I call Rod, Paul, and Percy on the telephone and ask them to meet me at the studio. I show them my drawing of a tropical volcano. We record two tracks. The first track I name “Over Fire Island”. On the second track, the interplay between my organ, piano, synthesizer and Rod’s Fender Rhodes reminds me of jazz keyboardist Joe Zawinul so I name the track “Zawinul/Lava”.

Go Outside.

August 18, 1975. I need a break, an escape. I want to get away, ramble. My girlfriend and I go on a trip. We travel for three days. We wander through bright, hazy, hot summer daze. We watch the violet and white lightning crackle and flash on the horizon in the skies. August 21 is a blue moon. I am finally inspired to write lyrics:

“Brown eyes and I were tired
We had walked and we had scrambled
Through the moors and through the briars
Through the endless blue meanders
In the blue August moon
In the cool August moon
Over the nights and through the fires
We went surging down the wires
Through the towns and on the highways
Through the storms in all their thundering
Well we rested in a desert
Where the bones were white as teeth
And we saw St. Elmo’s fire

Splitting ions in the ether

On August 22, 1975, I return to the studio. I excitedly sketch an electrostatic generator emitting sparks. I play bass pedals, guitar, organ, piano, but I am stuck. It does not sound like the image I have sketched. Who could create this sound? I call up Robert Fripp. We resonate electrically and musically. Maybe it is because his birthday is May 16, only one day after my own. I show him my sketch and tell him how I want him to play. His guitar work is the missing piece of the puzzle. After the album is completed, I credit him with Wimshurst guitar.

Remember those Quiet Evenings.

It is the end of August. I am feeling wistful. I am only 27, but I feel so lethargic and old in these languorous August afternoons. I write two more songs, “I’ll Come Running” and “Golden Hours”, to record with Robert Fripp. I call up John Cale and ask him to contribute viola again as he did in late July. August is now over and September has started. I drive to the Suffolk coast and gaze out at the shore.

“I’ve been waiting all evening
Possibly years, I don’t know
Counting the passing hours
Everything merges with the night
I stand on the beach
Giving out descriptions
Different for everyone
Since I just can’t remember
Longer than last September
Santiago
Under the volcano
Floats like a cushion on the sea
Yet I can never sleep here
Everything ponders in the night
We’ve been talking all summer
Picking the straw from our clothes
See how the breeze has softened
Everything pauses in the night”

I drive back to Island Studios in London and ask Brian Turrington if he will join me for a session. I play guitar and sing and he plays piano on “Everything Merges with the Night”. I mix and master the album and prepare it for release. Island assumes I will want a photograph of me on the front as I had on my first two solo albums. I think the artist should be absent from an album cover. An album cover should be a visual evocation of the album’s themes and title. I ask Tom Phillips to contribute a detail of his painting After Raphael.

Another Green World is finished.

Repetition is a Form of Change.

Ages 28 and 29 have been the busiest years of my life. I have been constantly traveling back and forth between England and Germany. I recorded with Cluster and Harmonia in Forst, I recorded with David Bowie in Berlin on his albums Low and “Heroes”, and I recently wrapped up recording with Talking Heads in the Bahamas. May 15, 1978. Today is my 30th birthday. I have been thinking lately about how anxious airplanes and airports make people. I am fond of traveling, but the incessant noise and perturbed waiting in the terminal before the flight takes off is unpleasant. Would it not be a better world for everyone if there were sounds at airports that were peaceful and tranquil? This is my next project.

I record the first (and longest) track in London with Robert Wyatt on piano and myself on synthesizer. I record the rest of the album in Cologne. I record the second track on side one and the first track on side two with myself on synthesizer and a trio of German girls (Christa Fast, Christine Gomez, Inge Zeininger) on vocals in Cologne. I record the fourth (and final) track with Conny Plank. I deeply admire Conny Plank’s production vision as much as I appreciated working with Michael Rother, Dieter Moebius, and Hans Joachim Roedelius.

Disconnect from Desire.

Summer 1979. Rock music is the addictive rush of teenage rebellion. I am less interested in that feeling now that I am in my thirties. I am more interested in the contemplative calm of childhood. I watch Harold Budd, a pianist from the Mojave Desert in California, play and I ask him if he would be interested in a collaboration. His piano is a cleansing sound at the end of this decade. It is poignant to me at age 31.

Autumn 1979. At Grant Avenue Studio in Ontario, Canada, Harold Budd and I record the album Plateaux of Mirror. We choose to record at the golden hour: in the mornings after sunrise and in the evenings before sunset. The cold weather and falling leaves have a deep effect upon us. The music and titles of our tracks evoke our surroundings: “First Light”, “Chill Air”, “Among Fields of Crystal”, “Wind in Lonely Fences”, “Failing Light”.

Ghost Echoes.

David Byrne is a soul brother for me- soul both in our bond, our musical telepathy (his birthday is the day before mine on May 14) and, more literally, our shared respect for African music in all of its complexities and rhythms. It is now a new decade. 1980. New wave is all the rage. David and I do not want to try to sound futuristic like all the new wave groups. We do not want the glitter. We want the grit. We are interested in exploring the past–what, unfortunately, white culture disparagingly refers to as the “primitive” or the “tribal”. We gather a group of musicians together with an emphasis on percussion (David Byrne and myself on found objects, guitars, synthesizers; Robert Fripp on tape loops; Bill Laswell, Michael Jones, Tim Wright on bass; Chris Frantz, David Van Tieghem, John Cooksey, Prairie Prince on drums; Mingo Lewis on bata, Dennis Keeley on bodhran, Jose Rossy and Steve Scales on congas and gong). We want to juxtapose this primordial spirit with the signs of the times. The 1980s in the United States already seem to be possessed with a conservative, insidious, right-wing madness. So we search for samples: a San Francisco radio talk show host on “America is Waiting”; Lebanese singers on “Regiment”, “The Carrier”, “Secret Life”; Reverend Paul Morton of New Orleans on “Help Me Somebody”; an exorcist on “The Jezebel Spirit”; the Moving Star Hall Singers of Georgia on “Moonlight in Glory”; an evangelist on “Come with Us”.

In Total Darkness.

1981. Although I have benefited from collaboration and enjoyed it, my life has been too sped up during these five years in London, Berlin, Cologne, New York City. I am ready to slow down. I am ⅓ of the way through my 33rd year- the same number as spinning vinyl. I have been returning to my roots lately with drawings, paintings, and photographs. I will never forget my hikes and walks down the coastal paths in Cornwall. Lizard Point has continued to spellbind me with its rocky cliffs jutting out into the stormy seas where there have been so many shipwrecks through the years. We record a track inspired by Lizard Point with Axel Gros on guitar, Bill Laswell on bass, and Michael Beinhorn on synthesizer. The process of recording this track begins to send me to other landscapes–landscapes I have never seen and landscapes from my childhood. In the middle of the night, I have dreams (or are they nightmares?) of dense, impenetrable jungles. I ask Jon Hassell to play trumpet on a track I name “Shadow”. I tell him I want it to sound like a creature in the gloom. I always am fascinated by maps of places I have never visited. I found a map I have had since I was a kid. There is a location marked Lantern Marsh that was not far from my home, yet for some strange reason I never went there. Lantern Marsh seemed ancient and mythical in my imagination. Fireflies and glowworms eternally illuminate the swamps on summer nights in Lantern Marsh. I have been missing the landscapes of my ancestors. I have been staying up late listening to field recordings of frogs by Felipe Orrego. Even though the frogs are from Choloma, Honduras, they remind me of the chorus of frogs singing during the spring nights in the Leeks Hills near Melton where I grew up. The frogs would chirrup. The wind would rustle the blooms and blossoms, the freshly sprouted green leaves, on the branches at the edge of the thickets. I have been watching Federico Fellini’s Amarcord a lot lately. I am always amazed at how the director captures each of the subtle changes in the cycles of the seasons in his seaside village of Rimini. I am nostalgic for the seashores of Suffolk, especially a beach in Dunwich I visited when I was 12 years old. It was a gray, overcast twilight in autumn 1960. I longed to travel to the distant lands on the other side of the sea. The twilight faded. It was time to return home.

Move Back to a More Comfortable Place

1982. I am not American, I am English. And yet–when I think of consolation (a balm for disappointment, loss, suffering), I think of the lonely sigh of steel guitar in country and western music I heard on the radio as a child. A documentary about the Apollo astronauts, For All Mankind, is being made. Space, for me, is best expressed in these words: Ascent, Drift, Silver, Weightless. I am recording a soundtrack for the documentary with my brother Roger Eno and Canadian musician Daniel Lanois. Daniel Lanois’ pedal steel is the sound I am searching for to convey what I feel is the amniotic void of our solar system, our Milky Way galaxy, our universe. “Deep Blue Day” is an astral, celestial womb, a baby’s consciousness, an infant’s perception. We are all floating in space and, compared to the chaos of Earth, space is a more comfortable place.

The Most Easily Forgotten Thing is the Most Important Thing

1984. Autumn again. We are in a haunted, melancholy mood. Harold Budd on piano and myself on electronic production record an ode to the most delicate, fragile, ethereal experience in the seasonal year: “Late October”. The leaves plummet to the ground where they will regenerate the soil so the plants can be reborn once more during my birthday in the month of May.

I am waiting. I am waiting like an empty flower pot.

By Mark Lager

(Note from the editor: The ‘Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel‘ was proclaimed on 14 May 1948 , one day before Eno’s birthday- he is almost exactly as old as the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Read his letter GAZA ANhttp://🇵🇸D THE LOSS OF CIVILIZATION.)