Unlike much other recent downtown music, Totalist music is totally scored, not improvised.

Both, argues Walker, are totalist sets of beliefs that advocate "an ethics for the masses based on survival as a rational being."

His debut album, Less Famous Than You, released in May 2006 on Use Your Teeth records, is clearly within the singer-songwriter tradition despite its incorporation of totalist rhythmic relationships.

For instance, the traditional ratio between frequencies of a major second interval is 9:8, and 9-against-8 is an important tempo contrast in many totalist pieces, achieved by having some instruments play dotted eighth-notes while others play triplet half-notes.