BUFFED UP... by Stock, Hausen & Walkman

BUFFED UP ...by Stock, Hausen & Walkman. Hot Air Releases 2020

Remixes executed (mostly) 1993 to 1999

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1 Buffalo Daughter: daisy pushed up mix
Mike D of The Beastie Boys phoned, incidentally they speak a lot slower than they rap... A LOT SLOWER! their phone bills must have been massive. In lieu of not releasing Organ Transplants vol1 on Grand Royal due to Dick Hyman’s ( and Woody Allen’s ) lucre minded publishers .. a remix task for a great japanese band on the label ( check out their track Great 5 Lakes ) Yumiko would occasionally send me exquisite postcards from japan for a few years afterwards.. i miss those.
in the company of: Money Mark, Alec Empire, UNKLE
financial recompense: good to excellent

2 Spaceheads: eat the machine
Long standing friends and collaborators. Remixing duties as National Service, besides which... it’s fun!
in the company of: Richard Harrison & Andy Diagram
financial recompense: none, but fair & equal royalty split, yealding - zilch.. until Tarantino uses it in a soundtrack :)

3 Ground Zero: constipations
Otomo Yoshihide was very early into the sampling thing and on our radar via his Night Before the Death of the Sampling Virus release, a sampling of japanese TV mainly as a response to japanese copyright law allowing TV stations to use his music without permission or payment!! this was released on the second part of an ambitious sequence of 4 CDs under the title CONSUME 1: original Ground Zero performance. 2: remixers of said performance. 3: public submissions of remixes of CD2. 4: remixes of CD3.
in the company of: Violent Onsen Geisha, Bob Ostertag, Gastr del Sol
financial recompense: good

4 Natural Calamity: dark waters & stars don’t remember mix
In general japanese musicians took S,H&W seriously and were often the one’s seeking the “music unimprovement services” offered. In this case the label also asked me to design & produce the sleeve for the vinyl/cd remix album. the fee was more than double the remix moolah, proof I was in the wrong game perhaps?
in the company of: Kool Keith, Money Mark, Asteroid Desert Songs, Buffalo Daughter
financial recompense: good to very excellent

5 People Like Us: keep going weewee
I guess it would have been weird for Vicki NOT to ask for a remix for her epic 2 CD birthday celebration. a (welcome?) return to ‘silly’.
in the company of: Bruce Gilbert, negativland, farmers manual, vvm, coil, mika vaino, felix kubin, xper xr
financial recompense: mates rates, ie: just a couple of copies of the CD.

6 Thurston Moore: Root
This had a title but they didn’t print any titles on the elaborate shw inspired Hoover Bag packaging and I can’t remember it.
in the company of: derek bailey, bruce gilbert, merzbow, luke vibert, blur, stereolab, r haswell
financial recompense: very average, possibly LOw ( see what i did there? )

7 Nov Music live
a small snippet of a live performance at November Musics “Sampling & Recycling” festival.. the source of the samples eludes me after all this time.
in the company of: an excellent live sound crew.
financial recompense: for the performance - good, for the CD: Nuffink! had no idea it was to be released publicly until it dropped through my letterbox.

8 Water Melon: How Did She Die? ( I dig yr grave mix )
I believe Tomita was part of the original line up of this ‘not quite so celebrated outside of japan’ group,, and Nakanishi was a member of The Plastics. What with that and sitting on a 12” vinyl next to Silver Apples. All in all, a tremendous honour sirs and madams
in the company of: Silver Apples
financial recompense: AOK

9 Spaceheads: Sun Radar, Emperor Heliogabalus’s Iron Bull Bellows mix
see track 2,, but add 17/18 years
in the company of: Graham Massey
financial recompense: you can’t put a price on friendship, so they didn’t.

10 hawkwind: Buzzard Pump Cover-up
late 90’s, a sheffield label called Liquid Records called planning an eloborate Hawkwind anniversary remix LP. “Orgone Accumulator” chosen because, y’know, sounds a bit like Organ accumulator .. plus I like the wilhelm reich story AND the track itself. Studio master track seperations arrive, mix done. Cut to - the KLF releasing their remix of Silver Machine and EMI’s lawyers slapping an injunction on said sheffield labels officially sanctioned plans. Even if you are in the right, you don’t get involved in a legal battle like that unless you have INFINITE financial resources.
in the company of: EMI’s lawyers
financial recompense: not bad, fee was payed despite it not being released and the Label being sunk by the whole debacle!

11 Peter Thomas space rocks
Raumpatrouille soundtrack was a firm favourite since picking it up randomly on cheapo CD in a Saturn dept store around 1994, a good few years before Bungalow started in on highlighting the previously obscuro outside of germany film and tv soundtracker Peter Thomas. I’d already used a few ‘bits’ on Organ Transplants V1 tracks before this remix duty call came in. The best thing about the remix release is its a double CD with the second CD being unearthed archive studio sketches done by mr Thomas on a newly acquired synthesizer. So the purchaser can effectively do her own remix, most likely outdoing any of the artists present on CD1.
in the company of: Stereolab, Schneider tm, Saint Etienne, high llamas
financial recompense: negligible, but an, on the face of it, fair 50/50 publishing split with mr thomas, which has yealded: not a sausage.

12 Vomit Lunch: karahi lunch runs remake
as part of my ‘Medical Milestones’ 7 inch series Mr Vomit Lunch solicited a couple of ‘remixes’ of Stock, Hausen & Walkman. In return i attempted to make him into a bollywood film soundtrack star via Hot Air Releases.
in the company of: hiranori murakami
financial recompense: Minus, 7 inchers were quite expensive to produce and this sold just a couple of hundred ( much like Hiranori’s absolute genius 10” on the label ) back in the days when vinyl wasn’t priced as some hipster ‘chanel’ accessory.

13 Ground Zero: interrogations
see track 3
in the company of: Otomo’s father’s okonomiyaki recipe.
financial recompense: as good as

14 Copier Coller: only samples from supplied disk used
For this 1999 event in Geneva & Brussels Franz Treichler of The Young Gods supplied all the participating artists with a disk of 50 sounds/track sketches. This ‘orrible noise is an edit of what was inflicted on the quite substantial audience live. The tale of the insanely babyish behaviour of one of the more ‘prominent’ artists present will be told in a future psycho-biography entitled “The Usual Suspects, The Usual Nonsense” as will the reason why Pita ‘bread’ Rehberg owes me money for Car Hire.
in the company of: david shea, dj olive, to rococo rot, Kriedler
financial recompense: for the gig - OK, for the Cd - Zilch

15 The Melvins: borehole
A group I was unfamiliar with except for the name and I may have been confusing that with Harold Bluenotes backing band?. No track separations supplied so everything was sampled off back catalog.. meaning it is not a track remix but a kind of ‘biographical’ construction more akin to a John Oswald thing ( greyfolded? ) and hence an entirely new composition, despite this and the fact that the fee was a mere $100 ( then something like £50 rather than at todays exchange, maybe £90 ) on politely asking if a royalty split might be possible, a flat refusal was handed down from their publishing company and hence a lumpy refusal to include the track on said release was returned by myself. I have no idea if the Band themselves had any knowledge of this.
in the company of: not a sausage
financial recompense: Poor, but at least they didn’t ask for the fifty quid back!

16 Blast First!: Bottom Feeder offcuts
actually the very first ‘payed’ remix duty performed late 1993 and in this case a great joy as the job was to hack apart much of the Blast First back catalogue , which in those days meant CD’s rather than any downloady business.. so fun packages of BF stuff started to arrive in the post and were duly decimated at home or in Dan Weavers dungeon. The resultant 3 tracks that appeared on the given away free to Wire Magazine subscribers Compact disc were utilised again in truncated form later in ‘94 on Hairballs.. so this track is the bits that were ‘lopped off’ stuck together as one oddity.. A) as an excuse to mention Paul Smith’s name and his great label, interesting to note that SH&W was on his radar before even Hairballs was out!
B) because, y’know, waste not what knot.
in the company of: christian marclay, philip jeck, john oswald, bruce again!
financial recompense: good and a lot of great records received for nowt!! that’s how it should be done.

17 Bob Hope: ...and that’s the magic of Hope!
an art project CD by mr A Dunn who, to his credit, specialises in diverting arts council funding into publishing inscrutable sound releases on cassette or CD. The participants see nothing of said funding but are safe in the knowledge that art will save them and that the resultant Disks will remain under a bed somewhere for future generations to discover and declare their ‘genius’ via the various intergalactic socio-psychic networks that will be available by then. The theme was ‘Hope’ so in this all the 1 or 2 word punchlines of a Bob Hope address to an audience of soldiers due to be dispatched to their deaths in frontline WW2 conflicts are truncated into a kind of pitiful poetry of non sequiturs and laughter.
in the company of: project dark, ruth jarman, reed ghazala, max eastley, paul devens & Laurence.
financial recompense: none, yr doin’ it for ‘art’ son.

18 Stillupsteypa: Darling I know..
erstwhile Icelandic Heimir managed to persuade a 10” vinyl out of SH&W and also a remix of his band, then resident in Amsterdam for a CD ep that came in a deluxe book-wallet reminiscent of early Hafler Trio CD’s on touch etc..
in the company of: the hafler trio
financial recompense: .. still in the post??

19 Steven Reich: 4 by 2 orgones
a production company working on behalf of the Nonesuch record label phoned to request a remix as part of this Reich Remixed project. In an unexpectedly obvious move Four Organs was the piece chosen. A piece I was unfamiliar with at that point. Turns out 4 Organs is possibly the least interesting listen in Reichs oeuvre. No Matter, we are in the business of silk purses literally stuffed with platinum sows ears, but what to do? surely a remix of a minimalist master requires a minimal approach, something to do with phasing and slow changes over long durations? after perhaps more pondering than time allowed I came to a solution, ‘sort of’ based on the earliest of his works. Two versions of the piece overlayed ( so 8 organs then? ) one at a slightly slower speed to create a gradual introduction of ‘phasing’ of the patterns BUT one recording going through a very steep bandpass eq starting at 100hz and ending at 10khz and the opposite on the other copy from 10k down to 100. All this performed manually direct to DAT. The resulting frequencies and interferences heard, especially as the piece neared the central crossover point seemed at times musical and at others as earbending as a Tony Conrad piece. This was definitely ‘structural’ music ... no time to make a copy of the DAT. It was swiftly Red Star couriered to the london office address for collation and sending to Mr Reich, who apparently only agreed to the project if he could have executive refusal on the finished works ( also Different Trains was the only piece not up for remix grabs, too sacred. )
Well that was the last I heard about that, no cheque or wire of the fee, no copies of the final CD/LP appeared on the doormat. To be frank I was far too busy/interested in other things at that juncture so didn’t even remember to follow it up until reading some slightly scathing reviews in the press later in the year.. Turns out what they wanted wasn’t a 15 minute long experiment in slow frequency shifts but, in fact, vaguely ‘danceable’ hiphop tunes with some vague reference to Reich’s simple melody lines in bite sized portions far far away from minimalisms long form developments. Another example of the music business execs viewing remixing as a way to ‘purchase’ the cache of known artists names to sell a product to the masses.
It was now absolutely the Morning After the death of the Sampling ‘Virus’ experiment that Otomo had championed earlier in the decade.
As the one and only DAT copy was never returned by the production company this version has been remade in ‘the digital domain’ though I still chose to perform the eq sweeps manually, the eq’s available now are certainly more refined than the TC parametric I used originally so I guess this version is a more surgical investigation. It’s included purely as a ‘bonus’ bonus track in the download for the curious and because an extra 15 mins is no bother for a digital only album.
not in the company of: any of those others that handed their homework in on time and in the correct exercise books.
financial recompense: minus - 90 quid for the Red Star courier charge, plus - egg on face/music critics disdain bullets dodged, for perhaps the one and only time.

“What does the money machine eat? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty, and, above all, it eats creativity. It eats quality and shits quantity.”
— William S.Burroughs

Ah! the Remix culture of the mid to late 90’s.. what a lunchbox of centipedes that threw up. A part of the burgeoning DJ culture of the time that seemed to imagine that it had miraculously stumbled upon a fantastic new idea. Of course, it hadn’t, it was just another mutated strand of the early 80’s ‘collage’ culture, itself an anti academic and much more underground continuation of things like Musique Concrete and experimental music/literature from earlier decades but with a certain post punk diy ethic and the necessary ‘can’t pay .. so borrow or steal’ mindset that the poverty under Thatcher’s rule had enforced, at least, in the UK, elsewhere will have had their own stimulating problems. And let’s not forget that ‘recycling’ is a 60’s thing, or a 50’s thing? no wait.. recycling has been recycled as an idea for centuries,
Stock, Hausen & Walkman was born at the end of the 80’s out of such circumstances, repurposed technology etc and informed by all that which came before it. The remixing/reconfiguring of recorded stuff, whether found or self created was already a quite common practise cf: the second side of the second NEU! album.
Complex Cassette tape pause button edits abound from the very first availability of such devices. Sampling was not new, Sampling cultural sound artifacts neither.. I’d had a second hand folkways issue of Jon Appletons ‘World Music Theatre’ since ‘79 and a favourite piece on there ‘Chef d’oeuvre’ was a remarkably silly deconstruction of a radio advert for Chef Boy Pizza’s and he made that in 1967 ! one could site Wolf Vostell’s art sound collages cutting T.V. war correspondences in with pure noise or James Tenney’s Collage #1 appropriating and cutting up several versions of ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ and that was in 1961, the year of my birth!
Industrial music had all that stuff going on as part of it’s genre, if genre’s are even definable except after the fact. The original S,H&W project attempted to collision all this with a new found enthusiasm for Improvisation, again, not entirely new but somewhat contemporaneously with thing’s happening in New York with Christian Marclay and Whiz Kid firing off turntable salvos at John Zorn in the Locus Solus sessions.
It wasn’t until early 1994, a couple of years after the Giving Up! CD was released, that someone actually paid us to Remix stuff. Up until that point it was all done entirely for fun, dadist critique or as obscure Burroughsian experiment. That person was mr Paul Smith of the Blast First! label proposing he send a shed load of back catalogue stuff ( free Sonic Youth & Big Black records... yes please ) and that we do whatever it is we do and send him the results. Well the results were hours and hours of recordings onto the newly aquired DAT machine.. but by carefully “not thinking about it” three tracks of edits were supplied for the CD comp “Deconstruct”
The 90’s take on ‘remixing’ was terrific for getting you out of the house. Stock, Hausen & Walkman seemed to get easily sucked into this world of ‘the Usual Suspects’ mixing up each others tracks for expensively packaged 12 inch vinyl. And at the more commercial end it actually paid money!! i mean, not Aphex Twinge 6 grand for 10 minutes work levels but sometimes more than a grand!
But... what were record labels asking/expecting for all that money? I’ve spent many a coffee break pondering that and have changed my mind several times.
Possibly the larger record labels are looking to just buy the name of a more ‘underground’ and hence hip artist as a badge to pin on their own artist and mitigate some of the accusations leveed at successful artists of being too ‘commercial’ I erred on this cynical side for a while, to the extent that I considered farming out the remix job to others with more time and possibly more talent, in fact that has happened once, possibly twice, FYI those don’t appear on this compilation.
But what if the artist has the necessary leverage at the label and is in control of the remix project, choosing only artists they enjoy or respect the work of? That’s an odd one. Surely some more intimate collaboration would be a better idea than to have your fave DJ mess about with bits of your sound over a 4/4 beat? It could be a reciprocal thing maybe? The artist as patron, dragging his fave underdog into some of the limelight he/she is enjoying. ‘Market Penetration’ must play a part, the remix artist often straddling some music genre/ youth demographic that the remixee wouldn’t have a hope in hell of enticing without said sampling disco fairy dust.
In which case let’s look at the ‘ethics of authorship’ of it all. In general, and for certain at the top echelon of this game the Remixee or label of Remixee gets the remixers track as a buy out ,, the £100, 1k, 2k or 6 grand is the full and final payment for the work done, no writing credit, mechanical royalties or even performance royalties are due the remixer, unless you want to negotiate for such, in which case the label will more than likely back off, there are hundreds of other game and trendy whippersnappers out there who will bite yr arm off for a C note.
Doesn’t this seem strange? In what way can that be an incentive to do your best work?, if you do and it’s suddenly getting massive radioplay or soundtracking an advert, all those royalties are going to the artist and publishing company!!
At what stage does a remixer become the shared author of the track?, often a remix might be the vocals of the original simply arranged over a completely new rhythm or music track by the remixer. In other cases, for example in a lot of Stock, Hausen & Walkmans deconstructions of other artists work, the original material is raked through with a fine toothcomb and picked apart into what Pierre Schaeffer in the 50’s called ‘Sound Objet’ and then re-assembled and worked up into something quite distant musically from any structure, tonality or indeed ‘Groove’ of the original.
How can the remixee possibly claim full or even partial authorship of those pieces? it’s like someone who casually mentioned Whale blubber to Herman Melville before he wrote Moby Dick then claiming they wrote it.
Hence this possibly ill timed album, it serves as an illustration of the range of approaches that can be applied to this ‘remix’ idea, from the fun time beat juggling of that first Spaceheads mix to the nit picky early laptop dissection & irritation of the Thurston Moore track.. about as far removed from ball swinging guitar rock-out as a beetroot ‘n’ kale smoothie from a Tequila with ice... not that mr Moore is a particularly posturing guitarist.. far from it. And it also serves as a small counter balance in the authorship debate that might be had over a good number of these tracks. Plus! there are projects on here instigated by artists such as Otomo Yoshihide, Vicki Bennett or Bob Hope that have genuinely investigated the idea of cultural repurposing over a sustained career and would have no problem with ‘nested’ concepts of re-remixing an appropriation of a collage of ‘found’ sounds rescued from the recycled vinyl skip, round the back of the HMV shop. No problem at all.
m@w&