Vertical Slit

The driving force behind Vertical Slit emerged from the hands of the prolific and uncompromising singer/guitarist Jim Shepard, who hailed from Columbus, OH, and would later front the band V-3. The loosely assembled group took shape in the mid-'70s, drawing its direction from Shepard's piercing, feedback-intensive guitar work and corrosive lyrical outlook. That approach first surfaced on the barely released 1977 cassette Slit and Pre-Slit. Additional recordings appeared in quick succession, including 1980's The Live EP and 1981's Smudge 7", yet these efforts remained almost entirely unknown beyond the Ohio underground. Although captured roughly five or six years earlier, the live Under the Blood Red Lava Lamp cassette stayed shelved until 1986; Basement 2115 followed the next year. National notice arrived only after a subsequent profile in Forced Exposure magazine, which sent collectors on unsuccessful searches for the band's long-out-of-print material. Vertical Slit and Beyond arrived in 1990, gathering highlights from the catalog, but aside from the 1991 cassette Your Wife Is Licking My Strobe Light and Grinning, Shepard devoted nearly all of his attention to his new project, V-3. He paused activity after completing 1992's Negotiate Nothing, having nearly lost a hand in an industrial accident. When V-3 returned in 1996 with Photograph Burns, the group had surprisingly secured a deal with the short-lived Onion imprint of the major label American. Shepard died by suicide on October 16, 1998, at the age of 44.