* PREORDER * CIRCLE X - Prehistory LP

* PREORDER * expected to arrive late Feb / early March

Highly recommended. The reissue of Debris was timely, now a long-time wantlist item is filled!

Circle X formed in ‘78 from the remnants of NO FUN and the I-HOLES, Louisville, Kentucky’s first punk bands. Prehistory was recorded ’81, released in ’83.

Prehistory is a tyre-burning left turn from the band's earlier EP. The pendulum arc of Tony Pinotti’s vocals still contain throat-shredding howls, but expands to contain croons, moans, speech. Bruce Witsiepe’s lacerating guitar is dumped into a dubbish aquarium of reverb, and Rik and Dave Letendre worry obsessive polyrhythms nearly to death.

The music of these Louisville-NYC art-punk-rockers continues to exist bafflingly outside of time. 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.

Prehistory was the most far-out psychedelic album of it's time, if not of all times.

They mastered playing with driving, almost primitive beats and noisey guitar blarings. Culture Progress is evident of that. Prehistory pt 1 offers a psychedelic approach to musique concrete as it builds into one of the most cacophonous jams ever. Angular guitars echo throughout as the singer eventually loses all sanity and breaks out into an almost primal screaming.

The standout is Underworld. This soulful, ethereal ballad of a duet between organs and guitar that creates one of the most interesting and haunting atmospheres. Drums come in eventually, but the psychedelic euphoria permeates the rest of the track. This song starts abruptly from Culture Progress's primal atmosphere. As the organs drone on, a powerful, one liner surrealist poem is uttered. As the droning continues, the drums come back, plateauing as the singer once again abandons all sanity, erupting in indistinguishable yet triumphant spasms of outstanding beauty.