consciousness

Bobok Katzer

Bobok was born on Oct. 14, 1997 in Minsk, Belarus, to parents who were both accomplished classical pianists. Bobok was moved around throughout Eastern Europe during the first 17 years of his life, spending much of this time with grandparents in a small village south of Belgrade, Serbia. Raised on ajvar, kajmak, and various Yugoslav underground legends such as Ekatarina Veliki, Sunshine, and Azra, Bobok learned English from watching subtitled movies by Peter Greenaway, David Lynch and the Cohen Brothers, and soon became fascinated with the American southwest. He moved to America in 2015 to study Archaeology at Ft. Lewis college in Durango, CO, specializing in the Ancestral Puebloan architecture of Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde. It was here that he first heard the Fuchs Brothers playing at Farqhuart’s Purgatory under the name of “Jack Mormon”. Bobok introduced himself and they soon began writing songs together. Three months later they were  performing weekly under the moniker of “Naughty Monkey”, until the unfortunate events of 6/6/16 at The Slaughterhouse in Pueblo, CO.

Anselm X. Fuchs

Anselm was born in Agate, Utah on New Year’s day 1998, Anselm Xavier Fuchs is the 13th son and 18th child of Adlai and Tecla Fuchs. At the age of 5, the family relocated to South Weber, UT, where Anselm remembers near nightly experiences with unidentified aerial phenomena, later investigated by the National Institute of Discovery Sciences (NIDS) during their tenure at Skinwalker Ranch. Both he and his next oldest brother Elijah began staying out most nights to watch the Uinta Basin light shows, along with other friends who introduced them to various psychedelic substances starting in 2014. After eating several hits of acid each at the Manti pageant and setting fire to a charter bus, both boys were excommunicated from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and relocated across the border in Massadona, CO. Here they began getting serious about playing guitar and drums, writing songs, and growing psilocybin mushrooms while bucking hay and poaching deer to make ends meet. Anselm says that the time in Massadona was characterized by, “A shit-ton of backbreaking work interspersed with deep dives into Bardo-ville. And a lot of Stone Roses.” A month-long engagement at a local ski resort bar resulted in both the breakdown of their original band; Jack Mormon, but also the creation of the seminal freak-rock carnival; Naughty Monkey, which eventually imploded and then resurrected itself as Bandini.

Walt Walters

Walt was born Prasan Legba Decker-McLaughlin sometime during 1995 in Rappahannock, VA, Prasan renamed himself at the age of 7 after reading Leaves Of Grass during a brief stint at the local Waldorf School. At age 8 he refused to return and began his own home-schooling regimen. He was later quoted as saying, “The faculty was basically well-meaning local parents, but they weren’t teachers. You think they ever read Rudolph Steiner, or if they did do you think they understood it? They were just a gaggle of crusties who were all into stained glass and making flags and puppets and shit. No one even knew how to do algebra. It wasn’t school; It was a drum circle.”. Walt spent the next 9 years teaching himself various programming languages, calculus, chemistry, bass guitar and keyboards. On his nineteenth birthday he began a one-way, two-week hitchhiking trip to Denver. “It was sort of an anti-Kerouac scenario. Even though I was thumbing it, it was well planned. And I was sober.” He found a room and a job cutting meat in Aurora, and began playing open mic nights around Denver under the name, “Walt Walters and His Many Illegitimate Suns”. Bobok Katzer and both Fuchs brothers first saw him performing at Cricket on the Hill. Anselm would later state, “He had a little battery operated amp, a looper pedal and a microphone cable without a microphone. He had torn the mic jack off and there were wires coming out that he would put in his mouth, and he would get this whole, constellation of tones when he touched different ones with his tongue. He just kept it in his mouth and was shaking an old metal milk can with his right hand for the rhythm. Turns out it was full of teeth that he got from somewhere. Then he did these weird, hypnotic gestures with his left hand, and it was all just so fucking brilliant that we knew we had to get this cat on board.” Bobok later added, “He was the sober counter-weight to our fucked up moment arm. He knew all about every single mystery school that ever existed, and Pythagoras, Hermes Trismegistus, the Comte de St. Germain, Joe Coleman, Mark Pauline….I mean, he knows fucking EVERYTHING that means ANYTHING to ANYONE. And he was the barometer. Sort of. I mean, even he knows things got a little out of hand in Pueblo. But thanks to him we rose again and now; Here we are. Wherever that is.”