page_title: Wah Wah (album)
section_title: Background and conception
hierarchical_section_title: Wah Wah (album) / Background and conception
caption_attribution_description: English: Brian Eno at the Museo Madre di Napoli Čeština: Anglický hudebník Brian Eno v Neapoli (2008)
context_page_description: Wah Wah is the sixth studio album by the Manchester-based English indie rock band James. After the success of their fourth album, Seven, the band entered Real World Studios, Box, Wiltshire, to record their fifth album Laid in early 1993 with producer Brian Eno, with whom the group had longed to work. Prior to recording Laid, Eno observed the band's jam sessions at their Manchester rehearsal room, and considered these improvised pieces to be as important to the band's music as their eventually crafted songs. He requested to the group that whilst they were recording Laid, they would also concurrently record an album of their improvisations which Eno and, by Eno's request, second producer Markus Dravs would produce in a secondary studio in the Real World complex. Each composition started off with the band's improvisation being recorded, which Dravs would then edit, generally alone whilst James and Eno were recording Laid. Eno and Dravs would take a "promising" part of a recording and then mixed them only once. Tim Booth's desire to re-record some of his vocals caused friction in the studio.
context_section_description: James released their fourth studio album Seven in 1992 to critical and commercial acclaim. Lead single "Born of Frustration" became their biggest hit in the United States at the time, becoming a Top 5 hit on modern rock radio, and the band opened for Neil Young on the tour supporting his most recent album, Harvest Moon.  The band spent the rest of the year touring before reconvening to begin work on their next album, Laid (1993). The band's tour with Young had proven influential on the album, especially because Young requested they play acoustically, something James had never done outside of radio sessions. The band's new stripped down approach for the album was helped by its producer Brian Eno. Working with Eno was a career long dream for the band, who had been trying to work with Eno since their first album, Stutter (1986); the band had sent demos of the song that would feature on Stutter to Eno's management but the band did not hear a reply, and they had consistently tried to work with him since. In the early stages of writing Laid, Booth addressed a person letter to Eno with a cassette of demos, and was surprised when Eno phoned him back, agreeing to produce the album.
  Prior to the six-week recording sessions for Laid at Real World Studios, Box, Wiltshire, in early 1993, the band performed jam sessions at their Manchester rehearsal room in order to form songs. This was not unusual for the band; Booth commented in July 1994 that "every song [the band had] ever created was spawned from improvisation," adding that "we'd go in a room and make a racket." For the first few years of the band's career, "from three hours of cacophony would come maybe two minutes of semi-coherence," which would ultimately "be the seed of which [the band] would attempt to repeat and refine and eventually reveal to the public." By the recording sessions at Real World, the band had become "more efficient" in their "method of extraction." All twelve songs eventually released on Laid had evolved from this process.
  Brian Eno observed the band's jam sessions during the rehearsals, calling them "extraordinary pieces of music appearing out of nowhere". He considered these pieces of "raw material" to be as much a part of the band's work as the songs that would have eventually grown out of them. Thus, he suggested to the band that in addition to recording Laid, he would also record and produce the band's jam sessions during the same sessions for a separate album, so that the band would be recording two albums concurrently: Laid, the album of "structured" songs, and Wah Wah, the album of improvisations. Speaking about the idea, Eno commented in July 1993:
  "Improvisations are almost always the seeds for James' songs. Before we started our formal recording sessions for what became the Laid album, I spent some days working with the band in their rehearsal room in Manchester, seeing extraordinary pieces of music appearing out of nowhere. It occurred to me that this raw material was, in its own chaotic and perilous way, as much a part of their work as the songs that would finally grow out of it. The music was always on the edge of breakdown, held together by taut threads, semi-formed, evolving, full of beautiful, unrepeatable collisions and exotic collusions. I suggested that, instead of working on just one record (the 'song' record, for which we'd already agreed a very tight schedule) we find two studios next to each other and develop two albums concurrently - one of structured songs, and the other of these improvisations. It seemed pretty ambitious at the time, but we decided to aim for it."
caption: Producer Brian Eno requested that James record an album based solely on their studio improvisations.
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