E2 guide to music you've never heard of.Change nothing and continue with immaculate consistency.Destroy -nothing -the most important thing.Short circuit (example a man eating peas with the idea that they will improve his virility shovels them straight into his lap).Look closely at the most embarrassing details and amplify them.Define an area as `safe' and use it as an anchor.Look at the order in which you do things.Remove ambiguities and convert to specifics.Don't stress one thing more than another.Discover the recipes you are using and abandon them.Make a blank valuable by putting it in an exquisite frame.Balance the consistency principle with the inconsistency principle.Consult other sources -promising -unpromising.Make a sudden, destructive unpredictable action incorporate.You don't have to be ashamed of using your own ideas.Don't be frightened to display your talents.Don't be afraid of things because they're easy to do.Take away the elements in order of apparent non-importance.Ask people to work against their better judgement.Make an exhaustive list of everything you might do and do the last thing on the list.Go slowly all the way round the outside.Allow an easement (an easement is the abandonment of a stricture).Are there sections? Consider transitions.Remove specifics and convert to ambiguities.It seems clear, also, that the deck was not conceived of as a set of 'fixed' instructions, but rather a group of ideas to be added to or modified over time each of the three decks included 4 or 5 blank cards, intended to be filled and used as needed. The introductory cards included in all three versions of the Oblique Strategies suggest otherwise. It's not clear from any other sources I've so far run across whether the cards were explicitly intended to be oracular at the outset (that is, whether or not Peter Schmidt and Eno necessarily saw them exclusively as a 'single instruction/single response' kind of 'game'). The Strategies were, then, a way to remind themselves of those habits of thinking - to jog the mind. Both Schmidt and Eno realized that the pressures of time tended to steer them away from the ways of thinking they found most productive when the pressure was off. These desks of cards tended to keep a set of basic working principles which guided them through the kinds of moments of pressure - either working through a heavy painting session or watching the clock tick while you're running up an expensive studio bill.

They each used hand made cards to break a 'stuck point' and continue moving on a given work.

The deck had its origins in the discovery by Brian Eno that both he and his friend Peter Schmidt, a British painter used the same technique informally. A deck of cards first published in 1975 for stimulating the mind during composition of music.

Brian eno oblique strategies cards