Amanda Palmer has been a busy lady. It’s been four years since her last record, Who Killed Amanda Palmer, and in the interim she’s been dabbling in all sorts of projects: business (you can read about her huge Kickstarter success), music (channeling her musical roots for her new album, Theatre Is Evil) and fun (adapting Neutral Milk Hotel for a high-school production). Palmer will also be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new feature on her.
Palmer: Brian Eno is a weirdo and a genius and a process freak. One of my favorite albums of all time is Taking Tiger Mountain, which I found at a cut-out bin of tapes for $3 when I was about 16 years old. After that, I scooped up whatever I could on vinyl or tape, but I never really became an obsessive Eno fan, and I knew very little about him and his world aside from the fact that he went on to produce huge shit. Like U2. But then, several years ago, my housemate Geeta Dayal, who’s a great critic and music journalist, wrote a book for 33 1/3 about Eno’s album Another Green World. The book itself is a masterpiece; it’s not just a book about the making of a record, it’s a book about how to make art and how to think about how to make art. She set the entire book up to mirror the Oblique Strategies cards, a set of playing-like cards that Eno devised to use in the studio. They’re kind of like a recording studio tarot. You pull, you follow the instruction, you commit. So if you’re stuck in the studio and you pull a card that says, “Rip up everything you’ve done today,” you rip it up. Sometimes it just says something totally vague and a little more kind like, “Honor thy error as a hidden intention.” Geeta lost one of her original packs of 1970s cards at some point. Man, was she pissed. I’ve heard there’s an app.
