The enemy of creative work is boredom

Animals In The Forest, by Yumiko Higuchi, contemporary Japanese embroidery artist 

“The enemy of creative work is boredom, actually,” Brain Eno says. “And the friend is alertness. Now I think what makes you alert is to be faced with a situation that is beyond your control so you have to be watching it very carefully to see how it unfolds, to be able to stay on top of it. That kind of alertness is exciting.”

As Visconti and Bowie struggled to find a new direction—not so much composing songs as carving them out of blocks of sound—Eno took to showing up at the studio with a selection of cards he called Oblique Strategies. Each had a different instruction, often a gnomic one. Whenever the studio sessions were running aground, Eno would draw a card at random and relay its strange orders. 

Be the first not to do what has never not been done before 

Emphasize the flaws 

Only a part, not the whole 

Twist the spine 

Look at the order in which you do things 

Change instrument roles 

For example, during the recording of the Lodger album, Carlos Alomar, one of the world’s greatest guitarists, was told to play the drums instead. This was just one of the challenges that Eno’s Oblique Strategies cards imposed, apparently unnecessarily.

The cards drove the musicians crazy. (This annoyance cannot have come as a surprise to Eno. During work on an earlier Eno album, Another Green World, the cards reduced Phil Collins, the superstar drummer from Genesis, to hurling beer cans across the studio in frustration.) Faced with one piece of card-inspired foolishness, Carlos Alomar told Eno that “this experiment is stupid”; the violinist Simon House commented that the sessions often “sounded terrible. Carlos did have a problem, simply because he’s very gifted and professional . . . he can’t bring himself to play stuff that sounds like crap.”

Yet the strange chaotic working process produced two of the decade’s most critically acclaimed albums, Low and “Heroes,” along with Iggy Pop’s most respected work, The Idiot and Lust for Life. Low was arguably the bravest reinvention in pop history—imagine Taylor Swift releasing an album full of long, pensive instrumentals and you get a sense of the shock. It’s hard to argue with such results, and Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies now have a cult following in creative circles. The Berlin trilogy of albums ends with Bowie’s Lodger, a record with a revealing working title. It was originally called Planned Accidents.

Here‘s a minimal, online version of Oblique Strategies.