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. 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 develop- ments 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.