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Complete first-edition set of Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies, a deck of cards developed as a creative problem-solving tool, with each card bearing a short prompt or instruction intended to encourage new approaches when faced with a creative dilemma. Issued in January 1975 in a limited edition of 500, the set is housed in its original black presentation box, 4.25 x 2 x 3.25, with gilt-stamped “Oblique Strategies” and “Brian Eno / Peter Schmidt” lettering. The set includes the original information card, headed “Oblique Strategies: Over one hundred worthwhile dilemmas by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt,” which is signed in ink by both creators and hand-numbered “100” from the edition of 500.
Prompts include “Simple subtraction,” “Don’t be afraid of things because they’re easy to do,” “Humanize something free of error,” “Remove ambiguities and convert to specifics,” “Imagine the music as a set of disconnected events,” and “Use an old idea.” Also included is an explanatory card outlining the origins and intended use of the strategies, noting that they evolved from Eno and Schmidt’s “separate observations of the principles underlying what we were doing” and could be consulted collectively or by drawing a single card when a dilemma arose. In fine condition, with minor wear to the box, and light soiling to the signed card.
Developed by musician and producer Brian Eno and artist Peter Schmidt, Oblique Strategies became an influential tool for disrupting habitual approaches to the creative process, with Eno famously applying its principles throughout his work as both a recording artist and producer.
The cards were already in studio use before the first edition appeared, with Eno drawing on Oblique Strategies during the 1974 sessions for Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy). After the first edition was issued in January 1975, Eno continued using the cards while recording Another Green World in London later that year, the first of his albums to credit Oblique Strategies on its back cover; bassist Percy Jones recalled the deck being shuffled and drawn during the sessions, remembering that the first time, he assumed the musicians were about to play poker. Two years later, while recording the instrumental ‘Sense of Doubt’ for David Bowie’s Heroes, Bowie and Eno each drew a card and kept it hidden from the other, then alternated overdubs: Bowie’s card directed him to ‘Emphasize differences,’ while Eno’s instructed him to ‘Try to make everything as similar as possible.’ Eno likened the process to a game. The method remained in use decades later: during the Viva la Vida sessions in 2008, Eno handed each member of Coldplay a different card to interpret while the band jammed, and the French band Phoenix used their own deck while recording Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix the following year.
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