The UK sound-collage duo whose triple-pun name salutes Stockhausen, names the Stock Aitken Waterman pop machinery it samples, and points at the Walkman it plays back on · a genuine plunderphonics act that carries the avant-garde lineage with English humour.
Stock, Hausen & Walkman are the avant-garde's own joke about itself, and a genuine act of it. The Bureau files them as a Forms figure because the name alone states a thesis this archive takes seriously: a triple pun on Karlheinz Stockhausen, the pop-production line Stock Aitken Waterman, and the Sony Walkman. High electronic art, factory pop and the cheap consumer machine, named in one breath, as the three things a sampling collage actually draws on.
Formed in the UK in 1989 by Andrew Sharpley and Matt Wand (with cellist Dan Weaver and guitarist Rex Casswell in the early quartet line-up), they emerged from the British improv scene and performed at Derek Bailey's request in 1990 before settling into sample-based collage. The method is plunderphonics: pop songs, noise, tape-hiss and found audio cut and pasted into bizarre collisions, with a cheerful disregard for copyright that is part of the point.
What distinguishes them in this archive is the comedy. Where most of the genre is solemn, Stock, Hausen & Walkman deflated the pomposity of the navel-gazing bedroom producer with the absurd artefact: a seven-inch single consisting of forty-two locked grooves; cassettes packaged inside re-sealed pocket cereal bags; pornographic playing cards as inserts. The anti-record as a joke, run through their own Hot Air Records, takes pot shots, as The Wire put it, at anything that moves, high art, low pop or cheesy listening alike.
Underneath the humour the lineage is real and direct. The sound-object of Schaeffer, the chance and found-sound of Cage, the cut-up tradition, all run through the work; it is plunderphonics done by people who know exactly whose shoulders they stand on, which is why they named themselves after one of them. The Stockhausen in the name is not arbitrary; it is an acknowledgement of descent, delivered as a pun.
The Bureau files Stock, Hausen & Walkman at Forms · Figure as the genre's self-aware comedian: a genuine plunderphonics and cut-up act whose triple-pun name salutes the avant-garde lineage (Stockhausen), names the pop machinery it samples (Stock Aitken Waterman), and points at the cheap device it all plays back on (the Walkman), while puncturing the solemnity the form so often carries.