Some 42 years after its initial release, Circle X’s Prehistory returns to the vinyl format. New listeners to this music will discover, in addition to the roiling compulsion in its odd, dance-damaged clockwork and instinctive joining of feral and aestheticized values, a refined understanding of the width and
breadth of “post-punk” music, both in and out of its time. In and out of time, Circle X operated between 1978 and 1995, formed in Louisville, KY, but existing largely as a New York-based collective, a band who insisted on working outside the standard definitions. Even their name—the symbol of a circle with an X through it—was a provocation. Typing it in English letters, just the sort of tedium they’d united to transcend. And they did: with two albums, two EPs and a handful of singles, each one of which challenged the developments of the present times with a bewildering synthesis of impulses and energies.

Arriving in New York in late ‘78, they found a rehearsal space and gigged around at CBGB’s and elsewhere, alongside DNA and other No Wave acts of the era, recording their first single before decamping to France at the request of their new manager, Bernard Zekri. They split their time between Dijon and Paris
and returned to New York in the spring of 1980, having recorded their “untitled” EP. At this time, the art aspects of Circle X in performance were brought to the fore. Similarly, the recording of Prehistory developed as much on a conceptual basis as the shows. In 2009, Rik Letendre told Dusted Magazine, “This was before the age of sampling. We bought a lot of mini-tapes for phone machines, and we were making loops and playing against them. We would record something, play it back through an amp, and then add to it over that. So it was like layered loops. As it became more and more layered, it became more distorted so you didn’t recognize exactly what was happening in the original recording. Things took on their own sonic presence.” And also: “in France... Bernard Zekri... had a bunch of Arabic records: Farid el Atrash, Oum Kalsoum, old 78s. We would listen to those and they had a great influence on us... some of those Oum Kalsoum records... we had no idea what she was saying, but you’d listen to her voice and you just wanted to weep. Also, the orchestration of it was just incredible.”

Circle X’s music has continued to grow through each further iteration of “the present times.” Their third and final album, an expression utterly distinct from all earlier evocations, was released on Matador in their early 90s heyday. The “untitled” EP was reintroduced to the contemporary ear twice, via Moikai’s 1996 CD version and Insolito’s 2009 vinyl repress. In both instances, it was noted, as had been in ‘79, how little their music sounded like anything else from then or whenever the current now was. That still holds true in the present present. Similarly, Prehistory was re-injected into the marketplace via Blue Chopsticks’ 2008 CD edition (at which time, BC described the music as “a tire-burning left-turn... gritty and cloudy... the sound of unhurried, committed exploration”). Again confronting the listener with its dark logic, as it will again today. And tomorrow...