Amongst connoisseurs of revelatory/off the map private press sides, the recordings of Mark Tucker have long provided a functional model of the genre at its most beautifully fucked. Tucker’s second album, 1983’s In The Sack, was an apocalyptic/dystopian concept album that centred on the American postal system and that sounded something like a cross between a teenage Van Dyke Parks and a slightly less disobedient Half Japanese. But his debut album, Batstew, released on his own Tetrapod Spools label in 1975, is widely regarded as his masterpiece. The whole concept for this fantastically unlikely recording seems to have been birthed via the conflation of a bunch of Tucker’s obsessions at the time, namely his car (which he referred to as ‘The Bat’) and his “She”, Eva Bataszew, an early girlfriend with whom Tucker had a relationship “riddled with paranormal phenomena”. The death of that relationship would later contribute to the deterioration of Tucker’s mental health and three bouts of hospitalisation for severe depression. The album was released in two runs of 100 copies each, including one personalised edition for Eva, where the title read Bataszew. “She never commented on it,” Tucker relates in the newly penned liner notes, “except to say that she played it for her cousin and he ‘didn’t get it’”. Tucker’s parents were similarly unresponsive. His father “never commented on any aspect of it but several years later, my stepmother asked me if I had written a song about a homosexual relationship, so apparently she had heard it. My mother, who had dreamed of me becoming a concert pianist – the next Rubinstein or Horowitz – hated Batstew in its entirety from the first minute to the last. She never wished to own a copy. After hearing the master tape of the proposed album, she told me ‘You’re selling your craziness’. I replied, ‘So was Beethoven.’”

Unlikely follow-up to an even less likely debut: In The Sack was Tucker’s second privately-pressed release following his legendary Batstew LP, a cracked, obsessional classic that combined Industrial field recordings of car engines with weird Barret/Ayers/Wilson-esque paeans to teenage perversion and hermetic personal tropes. It still stands as one of the greatest outsider/real people American privates. In the wake of Batstew, Tucker’s mental health suffered and after a couple of breakdowns he changed his name to T. Storm Hunter and recorded In The Sack in 1982, an apocalyptic / dystopian concept album that centered on the American postal system that sounds something like a cross between a teenage Van Dyke Parks and a slightly less disobedient Half Japanese. The sonics are little more song-based that Batstew but there’s still plenty of goofy avant action with found-sound, electronic cut-ups and weird garage-pop miniatures all soaked in that classic hermetic basement vibe that made Batstew such an essential album.