From: mmmm1@aol.com (MMMM1)
Newsgroups: rec.music.newage
Subject: Eno Speaks
Date: 26 Aug 1994 09:29:01 -0400


Here are some comments from Brian Eno on the making of the upcoming James
album "Wah Wah"  (Eno produced the thing)...


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 on the edge of breakdown, held together by
taught threads, semi-formed, envolving, 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.  Generally, we
improvised late at night and in very dim light.  We worked on huge reels
of tape, so that we could play for over an hour without reel-changes. 
Strange new worlds took shape out of bewildering deserts of confusion,
consolidated, lived gloriously for a few minutes and then crumbled away. 
We never tried making anything twice: once it had gone, we went somewhere
else.

Ben Fenner, who was engineering, attentively and unobtrusively coped with
unpredictable level changes in near-total darkness leaving us to wander
round our new landscapes.

I asked Marcus Dravs, who'd worked as my assistant at my place, to come
down and occupy one of the studios.  I wanted him to look at the
improvisations, and see what he could make of them while we carried on
with the 'song' record.  We'd select a promising section from an
improvisation and he'd investigate it.  Using bits of processing equipment
and treatment techniques evolved in my studio, he'd evolve new
sound-landscapes located somewhere at the outer edges of aural culture.

We were initially too busy in the other studio to bother him much, which
left him free to work with the material in much the same spirit as it was
originally performed - by improvising at the console.  As the days passed
and there became less group work to do on the 'song' record, people spent
more time in the wild studio, emerging from the jungle of interconnected
equipment in the early hours.

We worked very long days, but there was always enough going on to prevent
any loss of momentum.  Things happened very quickly.  My mixes from the
jams were all done in a single afternoon.  I was trying to get a little of
each jam onto DAT because there was so much new work flying around that it
was hard to remember it all.

I made fifty-five mixes that day and never mixed anything twice.  I wasn't
expecting that we would use these mixes in the end, but it turned out that
this fast, impulsive way of working was right in the spirit of the
performances, and the results often make a cinematic, impressionistic
counterpoint to the elaborate post-industrial drama of Markus' mixes. 
They set each other off well: the combination feels like being at the edge
of somewhere -- where industry merges with landscape, metal with space,
corrupted machinery with unsettled weather patterns, data-noise with
insect chatter."

Brian Eno
June 1993


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bye
mmmm1