Shit-Fi.com: Vertical Slit

Over at Shit-Fi.com, the reissue of Jim Shepard's Slit and Pre-Slit release is reviewed. Here is some of that:

By now many have surely noticed the increasing interest in the peculiar formation that was the Columbus underground rock scene of the 1970s and 1980s. If Mike Rep and the Quotas’s “Rocket to Nowhere”—the most aptly titled record of all time—is the lodestone to which fascination with the roots of this scene was initially drawn,* Vertical Slit’s “Slit and Pre-Slit” has long been the talisman, the mysterious record that one knew existed and suspected was the explanatory key that would reveal how to fix not just Columbus but perhaps Ohio and even the United States into a historical accounting of punk’s emergence in what I call “the long 1970s.”** Upon finally hearing this record, I am not sure that it reveals the keys to mysteries; instead, we can be grateful that it actually creates more mysteries for us. This record is unlike any other. Its original pressing size of 100 copies had mundane causes, but where the obscurity (and hence fetishism) of it seemed to turn on its unobtainable material character, in listening to it, the obscurity strikes me as embedded in the music too. It wasn’t just that one couldn’t find the record, it’s that once one found it and heard it, what one heard was nearly void of referents. In time, of course, punk and industrial and noise and UK DIY, and even bedroom psych and folk that preceded or coincided with it, would all echo it, giving it a strong premonitory and otherworldly quality, even as none of these forms in general took any influence from it. Is it a Rosetta Stone of underground music of the post-1960s, pre-punk moment?