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.’”

Another bewitchingly beautiful solo album from Samara Lubelski (Tower Recordings/Hall Of Fame/Metabolismus/Sonora Pine/MV et al), that moves away from the tranced instrumental brainbeams of her In The Valley album on Eclipse and instead re-visits the acid chanteuse moves of her first De Stijl album, The Fleeting Skies. The arrangements are beautifully positioned between classic baroque pop ala Byrds/Love/Left Banke/Montage, handmade basement moves and early morning Lower East Side comedowns. Samara's beautifully breathless vocals sound like they're being whispered straight into your ear and the backing band are a peach, including contributions from Hamish Kilgour of NZ garage legends The Clean, Matt Heyner of The No-Neck Blues Band, Christian Frederickson of Rachels and Cynthia Nelson. Limited vinyl edition with stuck on coloured sleeves in classic De Stijl-style. Highly recommended.

Brand new full-length recording from the duo of Matthew Bower (Skullflower/Total/Sunroof et al) and Marcia Bassett (Double Leopards/Zaimph/GHQ) features a more rock-reverent take on the kind of vertical screens of impossibly detailed overtone that defined their earlier albums, with Marcia's viola slow-burning fluttering afterimages of neon spirals deep into the air while Bower's guitar/microphone worship generates repeat-ascensions of overloaded ecstasy tone. Something grittier, more immediately tactile, that makes this their most dramatically meat-based orbit of hallucinated space/time vectors to date. Highly recommended.

CD reissue of this amazing side: Jakob Olausson is best known, if at all, for his sub-radar activities with Sweden's Joshua Jugband 5 (check yr Slippytown back catalogue for more of that brand of boo) but this, his first solo LP, is a whole other bucket of flesh. Moonlight Farm is one of the most beautifully nocturnal and disconcertingly intimate broadcasts to make it out of the heart of the wood since Joshua's Gold Cosmos. The overall atmosphere has the same kind of early electric feel as Matthew Valentine's Maximum Arousal recordings, while Olausson's evocatively double-tracked vocals move from a weighted down Skip Spence/Ben Chasny hybrid to a pro-denim and leather Leonard Cohen (or does that make him Jim Morrison?). His songs cross endless tranced dirges with drones that are so lunar they illuminate the entire horizon and huge distorto-smears of backing vox that sound like tiny fists crushing the light from stars. Some of the instrumentals here are so evocatively conceived - beautifully reconciling handmade DIY traditions and higher-minded bliss - that they sound positively Japanese, with a track like "The Wind Combs Her Hair" almost passing for early Che-SHIZU. But it's the songs you'll keep coming back too, elegiac teleports to the fringes of a whole other evocatively conceived universe, where every breath births reverberant shadows and the map of yr desires reads like a mirror of the constellations. From one loner to another, this is everything that the phrase "private press" conjures up and more. A modern classic. Highest recommendation

Ed Askew cut one of the best and most obscure LPs in the original ESP-Disk's vague rock/folk/freak series, issued eponymously and since reissued as Ask The Unicorn, before apparently dropping off the edge of his world. Years later, thanks to detective work by - naturally - Mr Clint Simonson of the De Stijl imprint, it turned out that not only was Askew still breathing but he had actually recorded a follow-up to his ESP disk in 1970 that had lain in the can for decades. Originally released as a limited vinyl edition by Simonson himself, Little Eyes blew even his revered ESP side to ribbons and stands as one of the most magical outsider/freak artefacts to ever escape the prodigious gravity of the decade in which it was birthed. Askew has a highly idiosyncratic vocal style that is equal parts quizzical bubble-gum chewing kind on shrooms and doe-eyed real people Richard Brautigan character. Perhaps the closest comparison would be to Tom Rapp or Judee Sill's old buddy Tommy Peltier. His instrumental conceptions certainly owe a massive debt to Dylan circa 64/65 - who the fuck didn't - especially his spine-tingling harmonica work but it's the beautiful arc of the songs that will keep you coming back, the way he combines rough, fluffed performances with eye-watering lyrical sentiments, heartbreaking phrasing and weird, clunky chords played on a 'Marin tiple'. If you ever dug the whole late-60s freak-folk fall-out as documented by Pearls Before Swine, Bleib Alien, Tim Buckley, Fugs, Roots Of Madness et al you are gonna crease. Simply put, one of the most beautifully cracked singer-songwriter albums of a timeless age. Only the hardest of hearts could resist it. This new CD edition comes with six incredible bonus tracks culled from various radio broadcasts across 1970 and 71 and liners by Byron Coley. Highly recommended.

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.

Debut album from this London-based girl trio who make the kind of glorious no-fi avant punk noise that would combine the melodic garage doofs of Dum Dum Girls and Vivian Girls with the post-ESP Disk exuberance of the whole Circuit Des Yeux/Cro Magnon scene. Suckdog and The Shaggs are the twin poles around which much of the contemporary DIY girl punk kinda hangs and their lessons have obviously been fully internalized by this bunch. The drums have a particular stagger to them that makes it feel like the main formal model is the percussion break during “Who Are Parents” and Pens have a similarly attention-deficit style to the best of The Shaggs material, with choruses beamed from Venus that inexplicably give way to droning casiotone breaks and cranky fuzz-guitar ballads that once might’ve been Azalia Snail taking off into the destructo style of Half Japanese. The whole deal is rendered with such infectious élan that it’s almost impossible to resist and with such an impeccable feel for the aesthetics of basement noise it’s hard to believe that they could possibly be British. But they fucking are. So bring it on.

The Michael Yonkers saga is one of the weirdest off-radar trips to come out of the counter culture. His recording career has been so far off the map that many collectors I know have gone so far as to dispute the whole tale, arguing that it’s an invention propagated by a cabal of underground heads. His 1968 debut, Microminiature Love, remains one of the crankingest slabs of avant/garage mayhem to come out of the Midwest and his even more mysterious run of folk records through the 1970s are consistently weird. Michael And The Mumbles muddies the water even further, with an album that predates even the Microminiature Love set, recorded in 1966 by a garage band that Yonkers was fronting. It’s obviously cut from the same paisley cloth as its daddy, but with a more desperate teenage vibe. The organ work is in the classic pud-pumping style of countless Music Machine-obsessed frat boys but the atmosphere is a shade darker and more, uh, ‘needy’, than your average wiped-out suburban, thanks to Yonkers’ desperate vocal style. Plus the fidelity is so odd that it’s not really era-specific and it has a similar non-historically locatable vibe as The Bachs LP, simultaneously of time and still defiantly of it, thanks to the crude way it was recorded. So, yeah, Michael And The Mumbles is Microminiature Love played in the garage as opposed to the basement, which almost makes it even weirder. Either way, it’s another installment in one of the most perplexing and unlikely stories to come out of the first wave of DIY junk. Excellent cover snap too.

Excellent new cultic psych rock from an ensemble out of Minneapolis. This self-titled album is the group’s second and it’s an inspired amalgam of Spacemen 3-styled fuzz guitar, peaking violin drones and vocal hysteria. The group’s approach is directly comparable to a buncha Euro-zone freaks, specifically Amon Duul 2 (with female vocals that touch on Renate Knaup’s stellar work on Yeti) and Comus. The vocals occupy the hypnotic centre, with plenty of extended tongue, while the violin and guitar provide the steam, generating monolithic gravities ala Cale’s work on the first Velvets LP and – particularly – Simon House’s work with High Tide. They succeed in beaming all of these historical forms far into the future with a focus on the jam that is obsessively minimal and explosively psychedelic. If you’re tired of dudes in coloured sunglasses soundtracking Top Gun then this is the perfect balm, wild psychedelic ritual straight from the source. Recommended.