Before Walls Of Genius
on the origins of Walls Of Genius
Evan Cantor: Walls of Genius, Once Upon A Time…
- This section is provided courtesy of Don Campau. It is copied verbatim from Evan Cantor's "early experiences" article at
The Living Archive Of Underground Music.
It was the Spring of 1982 and I was playing the bass guitar in a new wave band with Ed Fowler on lead called Rumours Of Marriage. We had started to experiment, a la Jim Morrison and the Doors, with extended jam sessions and poetry fueled by a raving male-female lead dynamic. I had played in numerous bands over the years, had dropped in-and-out of college to do so, worked construction by day and played bass by night, for years. Plenty of these bands were good ones, but none of the groups ever lasted more than six months due to some charismatic band-leader type losing his mind and causing an implosion.
I hadn’t even wanted to be the bass player in Rumours Of Marriage. I had originally wanted to be the recording engineer because none of the bands I ever played in had decent recordings and I had “had it” with musicians by that time. I figured if I could find a good band, I could run the tapes and become that sound engineer that every band so desperately needed. But one day Mikal and Riann’s bass player and second guitarist didn’t show up for practice… boom, I picked up the bass and in an instant replaced two musicians. That’s when I invited David Lichtenverg (later to become Little Fyodor) to run the 4-track reel-to-reel for Rumours Of Marriage.
When Mikal, the charismatic band-leader, decided that he and Riann (hence the “rumour of marriage”) had to go to New York in order to be where the real action was, the band fell to pieces. By this time, I really had “had it” with the traditional music business.
But I was unhappy with the recordings because I couldn’t both play the bass and oversee the engineering. I started migrating from Boulder down to Aurora (a Denver ‘burb) on the weekends to visit with guitarist Ed Fowler. We would jam all day, drink all night, crash on the couch, get breakfast and watch the Broncos, then jam some more. We would run a cassette machine the whole time and recorded everything. We dragged Ed’s friends into the deal and made them sing and play also. We became the Ed’n Evan Hullabaloo, the Dirt Clods, Jerry’s Kids, whatever name suited us on that particular day. We used regular instruments, guitars, basses and keyboards, but also kid’s toys, home-made shakers and knockers and whatever we could get our hands on. It was mainly about having fun and not having some charismatic taskmaster trying to lead us in tow. Finally!
David Lichtenverg was interested in our activity and eventually came on board. He had a radio show at Boulder’s KGNU (still does) and through that connection we performed on late-night live-radio and met a lot of interesting people.
One rich lady named Natasha was looking to rent out her fancy house in Eldorado Springs to artists of some kind and had heard David’s radio show with us performing live. I needed a place at the time, but I couldn’t afford to rent the place on my own. David pitched in, and then we had a studio for all these haphazard recording and jam sessions. This was the summer of 1983 and we kept recording, under a different name every time.
It was at this time that I happened upon OP Magazine one day while doing my laundry at the Table Mesa Laundromat. OP was a revelation. I realized that there was a scene, albeit disjointed and spread out all over the place, in which we could participate with the music we were making.
Eventually Natasha kicked me out of the Eldorado Springs house (“Why don’t you Jews go back to New York where you came from”) and we moved into the later-dubbed “Hall Of Genius” on 19th Street in downtown Boulder. We turned the living room into a recording studio and kept on recording under different band names every time we played.
“Walls Of Genius” was originally a title for a cassette featuring the “bands” Spazz Attack, Excitable Dogs, Vegetables Behind The Wheel and The Crooning Goons. We were definitely psyched-up about going wild, rebelling against anything we thought was a traditional approach and felt like we had figured out how to harness our own internal anomie and madness for creative purposes. The “Walls Of Genius” cassette was likely the first appearance of “Little Fyodor”, as Ed and I had handed David the lyrics to Alice Cooper’s “I’m Eighteen” one fateful afternoon and instructed him to “sing and go wild”. We didn’t know if he could sing. Some people may still be wondering…
We started trading tapes with the other people we read about in OP Magazine. I don’t know who the first contact was, but I can recall confessing undying love and dedication to Roberta Eklund and Tara Cross. There was a real thread of sado-masochistic culture in the underground at that time and I think we all had rich fantasy lives. I have no idea where or what most of our contacts are up to these days.
The name “Walls Of Genius” stuck and from that point forward we used it as a nom-de-plume overseeing all our projects. Live performances were “Walls Of Genius Presents”. If you came to see Walls Of Genius, you might be getting Strange Rituals, the Runaway Trucks, the Flaming Jerks, the Fabulous Pus Tones or the Fur Balls From Outer Space. Every performance would feature some long psychedelic jam sessions and maniacal cover tunes, David and I morphing into the Fabulous Pus Tones for the occasion.
In the beginning, we realized that we had inadvertently created the illusion of a “scene” of underground bands in Boulder, Colorado, although people caught on to the joke pretty quick. But the joke was self-prophetic as other groups emerged all around us. We tried to dovetail with a growing underground in Denver, getting in on the Festival Of Pain.
For a while, we had an ill-fated partnership with aleatoric non-musicians Architects Office and recorded and produced their first two releases. We collaborated with avant-garde classical composer Timm Lenk via our connections with KGNUradio. We experimented later on with total acoustic free-jazz in an abandoned schoolhouse with Leo Goya’s group Miracle and then released edited recordings on the Walls Of Genius “label”.
Attempting to capture the attention of the disparate elements of the underground, we experimented with sound-collage and musique concrete. Where I got the recording of Ronald Reagan (“Four More Years”) saying “You push a button and somebody blows up twenty minutes later”, I cannot for the life of me recall. Would he have dared to say such a thing on television? The atomic bomb explosions and marching soldiers came off a 33-1/3 LP of sound effects that I found at the university library. I sat in front of the tv and the radio with a cassette machine and a microphone recording whatever was of sonic interest at the time. We recorded the entire soundtrack of the fifties sci-fi movie “Mars Needs Women” off the tv and then played it through a PA as the basis of a lengthy jam session. At the top of our game, we gathered tracks from all over the underground for two compilations, “Madness Lives” and “Son Of Madness”, both of which feature the cream of the underground do-it-yourself cassette-culture crop of the period.
We managed to actually sell around 250 of our cassette albums, while distributing a total of nearly 900. This doesn’t sound like much, but it was a lot of work and our lives were totally consumed by it. The sale of cassettes enabled us to buy more tape and postage. I was sneaking into my workplace beyond midnight to produce photocopied Walls of Genius catalogs. I would issue a “certificate of Genius” to anybody who bought a cassette album. I was doing the artwork for and producing catalogs that were sent out to several hundred names internationally. We tried to promote ourselves to Rough Trade, Ralph Records and the just-emergent Rhino Records, but all we got were very nice rejection letters. It turned out that what had started as an anti-establishmentarian project had morphed into a furtive attempt to establish ourselves in a new establishment (the cassette culture). Because we did so many different kinds of music, and did them successfully, we touched a wide variety of musicians and artists in the do-it-yourself scene. It was this manic pace (over 25 titles in 3 years) that finally burned me out. I’m not sure if we had paced ourselves better it could have lasted longer, but that was not to be. But hey, what a ride….
Little Fyodor
Walls of Genius began to form in the fall of 1982 when two former members of recently disbanded experimental punk/new wave band called Rumours of Marriage started getting together to jam and party—not, heh-heh, necessarily in that order. Taking their cue from the final sessions of their former band, which had devolved from their set-list to free-form jams accompanied by the poetry and ravings of Michael Bellan and Riann Thonesson, Evan Cantor and Ed Fowler eschewed structured songs for free-form fun and experimentation, including and involving whomever was around in the merriment. Recording every session as new original material as opposed to mere practice, they immersed themselves entirely in improvised performance unpressured by the demands of practice and gigging. Evan and Ed expanded their musical palette from their traditional bass and guitar to all instruments at hand, from baroque recorder and percussion devices to toy pianos, old records and a 12” black-and-white television. These sessions evolved into ecstatic celebrations and guests became participants. Since the line-up on these session recordings constantly revolved, they gave themselves a new band-name every time they played, bands such as The Dirt Clods, Runaway Trucks, The Fur-Balls From Outer Space, Jerry’s Kids, The Ed’n’Evan Hullabaloo and The Psychotic Bozos. Roughly editing the best parts onto 90-minute cassettes, a project was born.
Little Fyodor (see abandoned article by Little Fyodor on the origins of Walls Of Genius, circa 1990)
Evan had experience doing all sorts of music, from prog to roots to punk to jazz, and he bought a 4 track tape deck to record the bands he was in. He was living in Northern Virginia at that time after graduating UVa where we met. I was beginning to take an interest in writing punk rock songs to express my alienation. We moved out of Virginia together and he joined a kind of new wavish punk band, well originally he just wanted to record them with that 4 track but then someone quit and he joined on bass. The lead guitarist was Ed. Then the singer and rhythm (or noise) guitarist decided to move to NJ for presumably greener pastures so the band was essentially broken up. But instead of just going their separate ways right away, they started improvising and recording everything they did. This was pretty much the inspiration for what turned into WoG. I originally hung out partly just to hang out but then when the improvising started, everyone in the room was encouraged to join in and so I did, once reading some prose that the rhythm guitarist had written cause he wanted a New Jersey accent.
After Michael and Rianne finally left, and after the summer was over, Ed and Evan got together to carry on in the same vein, just doing whatever (and WITH whoever, whoever was in the room at the time) and recording it all. They got even further away from the "rock band" paradigm by including toys and stuff and playing with people who weren't even musicians per se, they were just there to hang out, to party, but they could make noise on the toys that were around, and that was good enough! After three such sessions, in which a different "band" name was chosen for each session, Evan edited his favorite parts down onto a cassette tape and he made a dub of it for me, and presumably for some others too, like probably the other participants and maybe his mother. The tape had no name but plenty of liner notes, hand produced for each copy. This was how "the project", as yet unnamed or even thought of as an entity unto itself, was born!
I wasn't invited to participate at this point. I had gotten too drunk one night at Michael and Rianne's and Evan was embarrassed and considered me a nuisance or something. I was first included mainly to involve this woman I'd met through my radio show. She had a house in a small town called Eldorado Springs just south of Boulder, right at the mouth of Eldorado Canyon. I forget how or why exactly, but Evan thought he might want to move there since he was feeling very constrained where he lived at the time, with roommates who watched TV. All the recording he did with Ed was at Ed's house, or maybe other places. He felt he needed to move somewhere more favorable to setting up his 4 track and recording, and he thought Natasha's place might be the place. So he invited me and Natasha to one of these Ed and Evan jams. Oh yeah, it was at Dena Zocher's house. Even then, joining in wasn't made easy for me. I had to swipe some bongos out of some kid's hands. But once I got going, I felt like I fit right in! Natasha was about to leave town and offered to rent her place to Evan (maybe that's why he had her place in mind, I forget which came first). Evan really wanted to move there, but wasn't sure if he could afford it. I offered to contributed to his rent in exchange for him recording my Little Fyodor songs, some "x" hours per month. We recorded one or two songs, but eventually I found that doing WoG was more fun and as I was allowed to participate fully, I kinda decided on my own that that was good enough for me. Evan later confided that he was relieved that I didn't hold him to that.
Little Fyodor and Evan Cantor
Before long, aspiring punk “singer”-songwriter David Lichtenberg joined Evan and Ed. As they discovered the nascent world-wide underground network of “do-it-yourself” bands, distribution of their recordings was a de-facto effort to convince the world that there was an entire scene of bizarre off-the-wall bands in Boulder, Colorado, pursuing maniacal avant-garde music. Eventually the ruse was discovered and the name “Walls Of Genius” was chosen, from the title of their first self-consciously bona fide cassette release. The name “Walls Of Genius” was used as an umbrella organization for all these myriad “bands.” “Walls Of Genius Presents—Strange Rituals!” was the announcement for their first live performance. Eventually, Walls Of Genius became the one single name of the troupe, though it always was as much a project and an underground cassette label as it was a band in the strictest sense. Evan, Ed and Little Fyodor were the three core members (the Head Moron and Assistant Head Morons respectively), though any particular piece could involve any one, two or three of them and/or various and sundry others.
Little Fyodor
While hanging out at his place one in Eldorado Springs one eve, I mentioned to Evan seeing this zine at KGNU (where I did a radio show) that had contributions by Fred Frith. He got very excited to see this zine and we came to notice it that it had a column in it dedicated to homemade cassettes. This zine was of course OP and the column Robin James's Cassttenettes. This motivated us to keep making more cassettes from our jam sessions, knowing that someone would listen to them and write at least SOMETHING about them in a real live magazine!
Little Fyodor and Evan Cantor
Generally speaking, the music broke out into sections in an almost Beatle-esque manner. Lichtenberg developed his alter-ego Little Fyodor and employed the boys to support his proto-punk Fyodor songs. Cantor performed as Joe Colorado, doing maniacal versions of Hank Williams and CCR tunes, an autistic deconstruction of the rock music they had all grown up listening to. Cantor and Lichtenberg employed these two approaches together as The Fabulous Pus-Tones, screaming, moaning and groaning their way through the classic rock canon.
Extensive improvisatory jams were facilitated by the echo-plex lead guitar of Fowler, who could be implored to simply “go wild” in any key. Fowler, once unleashed, was a pure force of nature strapped into his Stratocaster. Many of these jams were accompanied by poetic recitations that verged on maniacal performance-art. Many were generated by source material such as the soundtrack to the fifties sci-fi movie “Mars Needs Women”.
In an effort to appeal and respond to the various strains of underground music blossoming in the “do-it-yourself” scene, the Genius’ began to produce sound collage pieces and musique concrete as well.
Evan Cantor: Walls of Genius, Once Upon A Time…
- This section is provided courtesy of Don Campau. It is copied verbatim from Evan Cantor's "early experiences" article at
The Living Archive Of Underground Music.
It was the Spring of 1982 and I was playing the bass guitar in a new wave band with Ed Fowler on lead called Rumours Of Marriage. We had started to experiment, a la Jim Morrison and the Doors, with extended jam sessions and poetry fueled by a raving male-female lead dynamic. I had played in numerous bands over the years, had dropped in-and-out of college to do so, worked construction by day and played bass by night, for years. Plenty of these bands were good ones, but none of the groups ever lasted more than six months due to some charismatic band-leader type losing his mind and causing an implosion.
I hadn’t even wanted to be the bass player in Rumours Of Marriage. I had originally wanted to be the recording engineer because none of the bands I ever played in had decent recordings and I had “had it” with musicians by that time. I figured if I could find a good band, I could run the tapes and become that sound engineer that every band so desperately needed. But one day Mikal and Riann’s bass player and second guitarist didn’t show up for practice… boom, I picked up the bass and in an instant replaced two musicians. That’s when I invited David Lichtenverg (later to become Little Fyodor) to run the 4-track reel-to-reel for Rumours Of Marriage.
When Mikal, the charismatic band-leader, decided that he and Riann (hence the “rumour of marriage”) had to go to New York in order to be where the real action was, the band fell to pieces. By this time, I really had “had it” with the traditional music business.
But I was unhappy with the recordings because I couldn’t both play the bass and oversee the engineering. I started migrating from Boulder down to Aurora (a Denver ‘burb) on the weekends to visit with guitarist Ed Fowler. We would jam all day, drink all night, crash on the couch, get breakfast and watch the Broncos, then jam some more. We would run a cassette machine the whole time and recorded everything. We dragged Ed’s friends into the deal and made them sing and play also. We became the Ed’n Evan Hullabaloo, the Dirt Clods, Jerry’s Kids, whatever name suited us on that particular day. We used regular instruments, guitars, basses and keyboards, but also kid’s toys, home-made shakers and knockers and whatever we could get our hands on. It was mainly about having fun and not having some charismatic taskmaster trying to lead us in tow. Finally!
David Lichtenverg was interested in our activity and eventually came on board. He had a radio show at Boulder’s KGNU (still does) and through that connection we performed on late-night live-radio and met a lot of interesting people.
One rich lady named Natasha was looking to rent out her fancy house in Eldorado Springs to artists of some kind and had heard David’s radio show with us performing live. I needed a place at the time, but I couldn’t afford to rent the place on my own. David pitched in, and then we had a studio for all these haphazard recording and jam sessions. This was the summer of 1983 and we kept recording, under a different name every time.
It was at this time that I happened upon OP Magazine one day while doing my laundry at the Table Mesa Laundromat. OP was a revelation. I realized that there was a scene, albeit disjointed and spread out all over the place, in which we could participate with the music we were making.
Eventually Natasha kicked me out of the Eldorado Springs house (“Why don’t you Jews go back to New York where you came from”) and we moved into the later-dubbed “Hall Of Genius” on 19th Street in downtown Boulder. We turned the living room into a recording studio and kept on recording under different band names every time we played.
“Walls Of Genius” was originally a title for a cassette featuring the “bands” Spazz Attack, Excitable Dogs, Vegetables Behind The Wheel and The Crooning Goons. We were definitely psyched-up about going wild, rebelling against anything we thought was a traditional approach and felt like we had figured out how to harness our own internal anomie and madness for creative purposes. The “Walls Of Genius” cassette was likely the first appearance of “Little Fyodor”, as Ed and I had handed David the lyrics to Alice Cooper’s “I’m Eighteen” one fateful afternoon and instructed him to “sing and go wild”. We didn’t know if he could sing. Some people may still be wondering…
We started trading tapes with the other people we read about in OP Magazine. I don’t know who the first contact was, but I can recall confessing undying love and dedication to Roberta Eklund and Tara Cross. There was a real thread of sado-masochistic culture in the underground at that time and I think we all had rich fantasy lives. I have no idea where or what most of our contacts are up to these days.
The name “Walls Of Genius” stuck and from that point forward we used it as a nom-de-plume overseeing all our projects. Live performances were “Walls Of Genius Presents”. If you came to see Walls Of Genius, you might be getting Strange Rituals, the Runaway Trucks, the Flaming Jerks, the Fabulous Pus Tones or the Fur Balls From Outer Space. Every performance would feature some long psychedelic jam sessions and maniacal cover tunes, David and I morphing into the Fabulous Pus Tones for the occasion.
In the beginning, we realized that we had inadvertently created the illusion of a “scene” of underground bands in Boulder, Colorado, although people caught on to the joke pretty quick. But the joke was self-prophetic as other groups emerged all around us. We tried to dovetail with a growing underground in Denver, getting in on the Festival Of Pain.
For a while, we had an ill-fated partnership with aleatoric non-musicians Architects Office and recorded and produced their first two releases. We collaborated with avant-garde classical composer Timm Lenk via our connections with KGNUradio. We experimented later on with total acoustic free-jazz in an abandoned schoolhouse with Leo Goya’s group Miracle and then released edited recordings on the Walls Of Genius “label”.
Attempting to capture the attention of the disparate elements of the underground, we experimented with sound-collage and musique concrete. Where I got the recording of Ronald Reagan (“Four More Years”) saying “You push a button and somebody blows up twenty minutes later”, I cannot for the life of me recall. Would he have dared to say such a thing on television? The atomic bomb explosions and marching soldiers came off a 33-1/3 LP of sound effects that I found at the university library. I sat in front of the tv and the radio with a cassette machine and a microphone recording whatever was of sonic interest at the time. We recorded the entire soundtrack of the fifties sci-fi movie “Mars Needs Women” off the tv and then played it through a PA as the basis of a lengthy jam session. At the top of our game, we gathered tracks from all over the underground for two compilations, “Madness Lives” and “Son Of Madness”, both of which feature the cream of the underground do-it-yourself cassette-culture crop of the period.
We managed to actually sell around 250 of our cassette albums, while distributing a total of nearly 900. This doesn’t sound like much, but it was a lot of work and our lives were totally consumed by it. The sale of cassettes enabled us to buy more tape and postage. I was sneaking into my workplace beyond midnight to produce photocopied Walls of Genius catalogs. I would issue a “certificate of Genius” to anybody who bought a cassette album. I was doing the artwork for and producing catalogs that were sent out to several hundred names internationally. We tried to promote ourselves to Rough Trade, Ralph Records and the just-emergent Rhino Records, but all we got were very nice rejection letters. It turned out that what had started as an anti-establishmentarian project had morphed into a furtive attempt to establish ourselves in a new establishment (the cassette culture). Because we did so many different kinds of music, and did them successfully, we touched a wide variety of musicians and artists in the do-it-yourself scene. It was this manic pace (over 25 titles in 3 years) that finally burned me out. I’m not sure if we had paced ourselves better it could have lasted longer, but that was not to be. But hey, what a ride….
Little Fyodor
Walls of Genius began to form in the fall of 1982 when two former members of recently disbanded experimental punk/new wave band called Rumours of Marriage started getting together to jam and party—not, heh-heh, necessarily in that order. Taking their cue from the final sessions of their former band, which had devolved from their set-list to free-form jams accompanied by the poetry and ravings of Michael Bellan and Riann Thonesson, Evan Cantor and Ed Fowler eschewed structured songs for free-form fun and experimentation, including and involving whomever was around in the merriment. Recording every session as new original material as opposed to mere practice, they immersed themselves entirely in improvised performance unpressured by the demands of practice and gigging. Evan and Ed expanded their musical palette from their traditional bass and guitar to all instruments at hand, from baroque recorder and percussion devices to toy pianos, old records and a 12” black-and-white television. These sessions evolved into ecstatic celebrations and guests became participants. Since the line-up on these session recordings constantly revolved, they gave themselves a new band-name every time they played, bands such as The Dirt Clods, Runaway Trucks, The Fur-Balls From Outer Space, Jerry’s Kids, The Ed’n’Evan Hullabaloo and The Psychotic Bozos. Roughly editing the best parts onto 90-minute cassettes, a project was born.
Little Fyodor (see abandoned article by Little Fyodor on the origins of Walls Of Genius, circa 1990)
Evan had experience doing all sorts of music, from prog to roots to punk to jazz, and he bought a 4 track tape deck to record the bands he was in. He was living in Northern Virginia at that time after graduating UVa where we met. I was beginning to take an interest in writing punk rock songs to express my alienation. We moved out of Virginia together and he joined a kind of new wavish punk band, well originally he just wanted to record them with that 4 track but then someone quit and he joined on bass. The lead guitarist was Ed. Then the singer and rhythm (or noise) guitarist decided to move to NJ for presumably greener pastures so the band was essentially broken up. But instead of just going their separate ways right away, they started improvising and recording everything they did. This was pretty much the inspiration for what turned into WoG. I originally hung out partly just to hang out but then when the improvising started, everyone in the room was encouraged to join in and so I did, once reading some prose that the rhythm guitarist had written cause he wanted a New Jersey accent.
After Michael and Rianne finally left, and after the summer was over, Ed and Evan got together to carry on in the same vein, just doing whatever (and WITH whoever, whoever was in the room at the time) and recording it all. They got even further away from the "rock band" paradigm by including toys and stuff and playing with people who weren't even musicians per se, they were just there to hang out, to party, but they could make noise on the toys that were around, and that was good enough! After three such sessions, in which a different "band" name was chosen for each session, Evan edited his favorite parts down onto a cassette tape and he made a dub of it for me, and presumably for some others too, like probably the other participants and maybe his mother. The tape had no name but plenty of liner notes, hand produced for each copy. This was how "the project", as yet unnamed or even thought of as an entity unto itself, was born!
I wasn't invited to participate at this point. I had gotten too drunk one night at Michael and Rianne's and Evan was embarrassed and considered me a nuisance or something. I was first included mainly to involve this woman I'd met through my radio show. She had a house in a small town called Eldorado Springs just south of Boulder, right at the mouth of Eldorado Canyon. I forget how or why exactly, but Evan thought he might want to move there since he was feeling very constrained where he lived at the time, with roommates who watched TV. All the recording he did with Ed was at Ed's house, or maybe other places. He felt he needed to move somewhere more favorable to setting up his 4 track and recording, and he thought Natasha's place might be the place. So he invited me and Natasha to one of these Ed and Evan jams. Oh yeah, it was at Dena Zocher's house. Even then, joining in wasn't made easy for me. I had to swipe some bongos out of some kid's hands. But once I got going, I felt like I fit right in! Natasha was about to leave town and offered to rent her place to Evan (maybe that's why he had her place in mind, I forget which came first). Evan really wanted to move there, but wasn't sure if he could afford it. I offered to contributed to his rent in exchange for him recording my Little Fyodor songs, some "x" hours per month. We recorded one or two songs, but eventually I found that doing WoG was more fun and as I was allowed to participate fully, I kinda decided on my own that that was good enough for me. Evan later confided that he was relieved that I didn't hold him to that.
Little Fyodor and Evan Cantor
Before long, aspiring punk “singer”-songwriter David Lichtenberg joined Evan and Ed. As they discovered the nascent world-wide underground network of “do-it-yourself” bands, distribution of their recordings was a de-facto effort to convince the world that there was an entire scene of bizarre off-the-wall bands in Boulder, Colorado, pursuing maniacal avant-garde music. Eventually the ruse was discovered and the name “Walls Of Genius” was chosen, from the title of their first self-consciously bona fide cassette release. The name “Walls Of Genius” was used as an umbrella organization for all these myriad “bands.” “Walls Of Genius Presents—Strange Rituals!” was the announcement for their first live performance. Eventually, Walls Of Genius became the one single name of the troupe, though it always was as much a project and an underground cassette label as it was a band in the strictest sense. Evan, Ed and Little Fyodor were the three core members (the Head Moron and Assistant Head Morons respectively), though any particular piece could involve any one, two or three of them and/or various and sundry others.
Little Fyodor
While hanging out at his place one in Eldorado Springs one eve, I mentioned to Evan seeing this zine at KGNU (where I did a radio show) that had contributions by Fred Frith. He got very excited to see this zine and we came to notice it that it had a column in it dedicated to homemade cassettes. This zine was of course OP and the column Robin James's Cassttenettes. This motivated us to keep making more cassettes from our jam sessions, knowing that someone would listen to them and write at least SOMETHING about them in a real live magazine!
Little Fyodor and Evan Cantor
Generally speaking, the music broke out into sections in an almost Beatle-esque manner. Lichtenberg developed his alter-ego Little Fyodor and employed the boys to support his proto-punk Fyodor songs. Cantor performed as Joe Colorado, doing maniacal versions of Hank Williams and CCR tunes, an autistic deconstruction of the rock music they had all grown up listening to. Cantor and Lichtenberg employed these two approaches together as The Fabulous Pus-Tones, screaming, moaning and groaning their way through the classic rock canon.
Extensive improvisatory jams were facilitated by the echo-plex lead guitar of Fowler, who could be implored to simply “go wild” in any key. Fowler, once unleashed, was a pure force of nature strapped into his Stratocaster. Many of these jams were accompanied by poetic recitations that verged on maniacal performance-art. Many were generated by source material such as the soundtrack to the fifties sci-fi movie “Mars Needs Women”.
In an effort to appeal and respond to the various strains of underground music blossoming in the “do-it-yourself” scene, the Genius’ began to produce sound collage pieces and musique concrete as well.