Circle X - Prehistory Circle X

Some 42 years after its initial release, Drag City returns Circle X’s Prehistory to the vinyl format on February 27th, 2026.
The Louisville-NYC art-punk-rockers insisted on carving a system beyond standard definition, their debut album existing bafflingly outside of time when first released in 1983.
Decades later, they shall continue to exist as an extraordinary, near-unclassifiable band out of New York’s No Wave movement.

Circle X was formed in Louisville, Kentucky, operating between 1978 and 1995 but existing largely as a New York-based collective.
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, yielding great influence from the Arabic records Zekri turned the band onto.
“Farid el Atrash, Oum Kalsoum, old 78s,” guitarist Rik Letendre describes.

Recorded in 1981, Prehistory developed as much on a conceptual basis as the band’s avant-garde live shows.
“This was before the age of sampling,” Letendre told Dusted Magazine in 2009.
“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… 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.” New listeners will find, in addition to the roiling compulsion of its odd, dance-damaged clockwork and synthesis of feral and aestheticized values, a refined understanding of the width and breadth of “post-punk” music, from any era, known or unknown.

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 the time, David Grubbs’ affiliate label described the music as “a tire-burning left-turn… gritty and cloudy… the sound of unhurried, committed exploration.”

Prehistory, again confronting the listener with its dark logic, as it will again today.
And tomorrow…