This is one of those lp's that I've heard about for years. People'd say to me "Roland, it's right up your alley" or "Roland it's terrible. You'd love it!" but when I'd ask'em to describe it they'd go doe-eyed & get all pickle faced 'n say "you just have to hear it for yourself." Well finally, thanks to the De Stijl label, I have. And let me tell you something; I am perplexed about what I heard. Mostly, I guess, 'cause I ain't hearin things what other scribes have insinuated I should. Department Store Santas? Desperate Bicycles? Not in my kung fu village! To me this lp teeters on a precipice between euphoria & anguish. It is certainly the work of an unstable mind & tortured soul. I mean, you can almost feel Tucker's circuits shorting out as the record progresses. You don't need to read the insert to hear that! There's alot of sadness & confusion goin on too. It's a record about a guy's love for his car. It's a record about guy's love for his girl. There's a song that's evidently an ode to homosexual love (not that there's anything wrong w/that). The guy records himself talkin to his car, slammin the doors, the girl whispers & sings along sometimes. Yeah, it has it's moments; like the naif, art brut-ish noisescapes that Tucker occasionally creates or like the dingaling song at the end of side 2 that's about a Cadillac (among other things) that eventually crumbles into a fuzzy guitar "freakout". It is one odd fucker of an lp, there's no denyin that. But how someone-& I won't say who-winds up comparin it to the albums by Department Store Santas & Desperate Bicycles is beyond me. Oh sure, those're nice lures your tossin out there, but they're inappropriate. Those bands lp's are challenging. Tucker's is more challenged. Maybe what they meant to say was that one day Mark Tucker saw someone dressed as a department store Santa, went banana's, then desperately rode a bicycle to the mental institution. I dunno. I wasn't there. If I was to sell you this record I would say "imagine a record that sounds like someone who claims to be Daniel Johnston who rerecorded Smile" or "imagine if Larry Fischer had been commissioned to do the Pink Moon lp as literally a Volkswagen commercial". Would you buy it? I know I would because that sounds like something that's right up my alley & the descriptions are terrible enough that I'd probably love it. That said, Batstew is certainly a unique album. I dunno about a masterpiece, but shorter people are prone to exaggeration. And that's a fact! I'm glad I got the hear it & props to De Stijl for reissuing it. (This is a review of the LP version, available at www.fusetronsound.com )

Once upon a time, when the cassette portastudio was but a dream of the future, there was the Teac A3340. This 4 track reel to reel was originally designed with the hi-fi buff in mind, as quadrophonic sound systems looked set to take off. Quad failed, but the 3340 found a far greater niche: it was the first affordable multi-track tape recorder you could use at home. Mark Tucker had one and in 1975 he started recording sounds from an old Cadillac hearse, then incorporated these into an album of songs which, at the time, was derided by the few people who got to hear it. Aside from the vintage noises of the ARP synth, this does not sound like a 30 year old record at all. It pre-dates Daniel Johnston and Jad Fair by a long mile and the only vaguely comparable reference point from the time I can think of would be Jonathan Richman at his most experimental. Batstew, however, goes to a very different place... songs that run from an English folk pastiche to elements of abstract sound a-la musique concrete, tape manipulations and electronics. A fascinating insert on the album and the people involved is included. Strongly recommended.

I used to live in this neighborhood with these guys who would rev their car engines for no apparent reason during the day and sometimes, excruciatingly, at night. First they’d turn the car engine over, then let them idle loudly for a bit before gunning them, overdriving the engines until the noise was loud and shrill and honestly painful to hear. This totally random macho machine madness used to drive me nuts, esp when trying to take a nap. “What the hell are they doing out there?” I’d wonder. This was a long time before I heard Mark Tucker’s album “Batstew”. Now, I realize how unhip I was, these guys were just paying tribute to “the Bat”! Part raw-boned singer-songwriter album, part field recordings, part monologue and all ode to a 1964 Cadillac, Tucker’s self-recorded and self-released album “Batstew” is one strange beast indeed. Not the type of thing you are likely to come across in your normal recording hunting travels. A good chunk of the first half of the album is taken up with recordings of Tucker’s, more specifically engine sounds, doors opening and closing, trunks slamming, plus Tucker speaking directly to the car, all while various extraneous sounds of birds, other car horns etc., filter through your speakers. Occasionally these vignettes are interrupted by songs such as “Sideways Love”, a defiant ballad about two boys in love, played on a slightly out-of-tune piano. The music throughout has the feel of a t.v. movie soundtrack with similar motifs playing out repeatedly. Simple, honest and sometimes very cheery songs about cars (mostly), a girl (according to the notes anyway) and honey trees. “1964 Cadillac” details a housewife’s 19th nervous breakdown in style not too far from a loose Mayo Thompson/Red Krayola number and also serves as a sort of “Batstew” prologue. “Most people don’t ordinarily show affection to their cars” Tucker says at one point, one might point out they even less frequently write entire albums about their cars. The second side is where the album derives most of its reputation, the ten minute “Submerged Bat Vortex” is a collage of tape manipulations, proto-“Close Encounters” ARP synth damage, more car sounds, squirrely bleeps, bloops and other deep space effects. However, for all this weirdness the album never feels inept or “outsider-y”, it has a genuine innocence and naivety about it, in fact some of that genuineness begins to grate over the course of an entire record. The liner notes, written by Tucker, who now goes by the name T. Storm Hunter, detail the story of the album, following the somewhat predictable path of how no one understood or liked the record, but it went on to gain a cult following and the sad end of some of the main collaborators. I suppose it is pretty unlikely that those guys in my old neighborhood were playing tribute to “Batstew”, but man it would cool if they had been!

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.’” Batstew draws on a number of sonic strategies, all of which are satisfyingly bent. The core of the material is based around recordings of his car, a 1964 Cadillac - ticking over, revving up, its engine dying – that predate the orchestrated mechanics of David Jackman and Vagina Dentata Organ. These sections are cut up with beautiful songs, all executed with a level of unself-conscious exuberance that is extremely poignant. The closest parallel is definitely the kind of benign DIY current loosed by the Department Store Santas LP and the themes are just as odd, with a beautiful gay love song centred on two young kids – “Sideways Love Forever” – sandwiched between damaged folk rock blasters, pre-lapsarian jigs, field recording from deep inside the void of 1970s suburbia, snippets of Tucker talking to his car, piano led lost-teen ballads and huge zones of “car-sounds-run-through-tremolo-pedal effects and tape manipulation”. “Some listeners have pointed out that much of what is on the album, particularly the long, disjointed, droning, melting, nightmarish ‘Submerged Bat Vortex’ strongly suggests mental illness,” Tucker confesses. Eva herself contributes vocals to “Honey Tree”, while Tucker’s armoury is bolstered by co-conspirator Shakey T. Colley on blues harp, electric guitar and tape manipulation as well as Chris DeMuynck on electric bass, John Vignola on acoustic guitar and Tom Von Ebers on electric guitar. “The last time I saw Eva Bataszew was on her 24th birthday: September 4, 1979,” Tucker relates. “She died, apparently by her own hand, in 1987. I didn’t hear about it until 1990. Shakey T. Colley died at age 40 in 1996 of what appeared to be an accidental overdose of drugs. They had both been alcoholics. For personal and professional reasons, I legally changed my name in 1991 to T. Storm Hunter. From 1979 to 1993, I continued to write and record, eventually issuing most of this material on CDs and posting downloadable songs on the Internet. Yet, this album – which most people found incomprehensible and unlistenable in 1975 – is the one work in my discography which, after more than a quarter-century of obscurity, is finding an audience. Go figure.” As a document of the singular experience of a star-crossed group of friends, lost somewhere in mid-century America and fully committed to the defiant arc of their own tongues, Batstew remains unparalleled. Highest possible recommendation.