Brian Eno kept a deck of cards to sabotage his own certainty
Oblique Strategies gave musicians a random instruction mid-session. David Bowie's producers used it when the studio went quiet.
In 1975, Brian Eno and the painter Peter Schmidt published a deck of over a hundred cards, each printed with a single cryptic instruction: Honour thy error as a hidden intention. Try faking it. Ask your body. Ask people to work against their better judgment. Both men had independently been jotting down these prompts for years — Schmidt on the backs of discarded prints in his studio, Eno on bamboo cards — before combining them into what they called Oblique Strategies.
The use case was narrow and specific: the moment in a session when momentum stalls and everyone in the room defaults to the safest, most familiar move. Instead of debating what to do next, someone draws a card and does what it says, no matter how strange the instruction sounds applied to a chord change or a mix.
Eno used the deck extensively while producing David Bowie's Berlin-era albums — Low, "Heroes", and Lodger — and studio players including Carlos Alomar have described drawing cards mid-session when a track hit a wall. Bands from the B-52's to LCD Soundsystem have since used their own copies for the same reason.
The deck doesn't generate ideas. It removes the option of relying on your default one. A card that says use an old idea forces you to notice you were about to use one anyway, just without admitting it.