V-3 – Unbroken Silence [Cass] (1989, Iron Press)

Monomaniacal home-recordists-cum-outsider-musicians are getting to be a rather common breed, but Columbus, Ohio’s Jim Shepard was hunkered down in his primordial lair back when most people thought “lo-fi” meant listening to music on a transistor radio. Far more devoted to noise than most one-man/4-track operations, Shepard -who hung himself at home in October 1998- had a flair for carving out blocks of blue-collar art-rock that rivals fellow Rust Belt survivors like Destroy All Monsters and Pere Ubu (in its heyday). He also tempered the smart-guy sound-assemblage with a dark and smoky garage aesthetic born of toxin-laden practice spaces and beer-soaked lunch hours out behind the plant. 

 
Shepard inaugurated his insular experimentation back in the late ’70s with Vertical Slit, a free-ranging, amorphously constructed band that laid out its lattices of scree around the leader’s extraordinary guitar constructions. You can hear bits of MC5er Fred “Sonic” Smith, Sonny Sharrock and Can’s Michael Karoli in Shepard’s alternately piercing and massaging use of feedback, while his lyrics coat everything in sight with overlapping bile and black humor. An array of cassette releases and micro-pressed records -in editions ranging from 100 ('Slit and Pre-Slit') to a whopping 300 ('The Live EP')- were excerpted for 'Vertical Slit and Beyond', a revelatory 1976-’90 compendium of isolationist howl that would be impossible to replicate in an age of networking and backslapping indie-rock support groups. 

 
Not that the confronto-delic aesthetic that endures in V-3 (a combo Shepard put together) exactly conforms to that of the whippersnappers who have sprung up over the years. In fact, his last-sane-man-on-earth stance might be even more pronounced in this setting. [SOURCE: TROUSER PRESS]

 

 

Label: Iron Press – none 

Format: Cassette, Album 

Country: US 

Released: 1989 

Style: Indie Rock, Lo-Fi, Post-Punk, Slacker Rock, Psychedelic Rock, Neo-Psychedelia, Noise Rock, Experimental Rock

 

Tracklist: 

A1 Unbroken Silence 

A2 Party/Cop/Judge 

A3 Photograph Burns 

A4 Why I Shot The President 

A5 Central Park 

A6 To Breathe No More 

A7 Nobody Make The Jukebox Please 

B1 Inside Outpost 

B2 Don't Blame Me 

B3 Scrap Metal Burial Ground 

B4 The Artist 

B5 Birds And Garbage 

B6 Voices In The Woods 

B7 The Enemy Within 

B8 Bloody Veteran Feedback 

 

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