Circle X - Prehistory

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.

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.