Circle X - Prehistory

Format: LP
Catalogue No.: DC968
Barcode: 0781484096818
Release Date: 27 Feb 2026
Genre: Post Rock/Experimental

 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.  Around 1980, 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 (guitar) 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, [their new manager] 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’. ‘Prehistory’ was re-injected into the marketplace via Blue Chopsticks’ 2008 CD edition (at which time, the label 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.
 Available to independent retailers on vinyl with printed inner sleeve.

Tracklisting
Current
Prehistory Part I
Prehistory Part II
Culture Progress
Underworld
Beyond Standard