Stock, Hausen & Walkman

It's close to a sure bet that, at least in the field of electronic music, no other artist's name makes quite as much sense as Stock, Hausen & Walkman -- a triple pun embracing pioneering electronic composer and theorist Karlheinz Stockhausen, the '80s pop-by-numbers production team Stock, Aitken & Waterman, and the ubiquitous portable cassette player manufactured by Sony. The sampling duo of Andrew Sharpley and Matt Wand appear to have been influenced equally by each of the three, resulting in bizarre collisions of cut-and-pasted pop songs, noise, tape-hiss, and a perceived avant-garde sensibility regarding the sampling technology (and legality). While humor has never been completely absent from electronica, the pair also helped deflate the pomposity of the usual cast of navel-gazing bedroom producers, whether it's releasing a seven-inch single consisting of 42 locked grooves, packaging cassettes in Rice Krispies bags, or including pictures of pornographic playing cards with their Organ Transplants album.

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