Well, last night decided I was wasting my time trying to escape the clutches of kbuild and wrote an appropriate Kconfig and makefile to integrate my snd-aica module into the kernel build and after a bit of footering to get it all right, built an empty shell snd-aica module.
One difficulty I have found is that modules_install installs the modules under 2.6.0-test2-sh while the sh system itself regards itself as pure 2.6.0-test2, so I have had to move the modules by hand.
The lack of BusyBox support for 2.5/2.6 type modules is also a pain, but I know they are addressing that.
Anyway, just built a slightly less shell like snd-aica module that does the proper ALSA thing of registering cards and chips.
More to do, more to do...