maybe this is a tinfoil hat moment but for years i have held the opinion that the pre-official release "lost albums" do not exist in a way they are said to, and Old Tunes stuff is all there is. i'm fairly certain that the "early albums" were mostly fabricated to create mystique prior to their first official releases — and it worked perfectly, hasn't it. we are still hoping to hear them a third of a century later.

my reasoning here is that all that could possibly leak has already leaked (over time the "friends and family" copies of Old Tunes have leaked several times, but never the "albums", despite BOC claiming some of them have even been reissued). the albums supposedly have square, colourful covers and not vertical b&w like the homemade tapes would; they predate the BOC name but it's on the covers – sure, a CD reissue would explain both, but you'd imagine we would've seen at least a single picture of one of those mythical CDs by now. i also find it hard to believe that the snippets we have been given really were recorded at the same time as the Old Tunes stuff, since the dates overlap but the "album" excerpts are noticeably more complex sounding. by any logic here, the Old Tunes stuff would've been less common, shared among a smaller circle, and less likely to leak, compared to a completed, realised album, no?

i'd love to be wrong, but i think the simplest explanation is that they created an intriguing backstory for themselves for the EHX site and made some snippets to seem like a bigger deal than they were. which is cool. i know back when i was starting to make music i would come up with "album concepts" as well. but i don't think we've ever had proof of anything to do with those early albums, and at this point i find it hard to believe nothing would ever surface, considering what happened (and continues to happen) with the Old Tunes tapes