Goldi's Almostopster: Circle of Dust - Disengage

This week, it's a vortex heavyweight's turn to choose an album

My first memories of music are wishing it was heavier. Before I had internet access, I spent years quietly combing through my father’s record collection looking for something, anything, that had aggression, playing CD after CD of soft rock, CCM, pop, 80s dance, disco, and for years my precious treasure vault amounted to “Godzilla” by Blue Öyster Cult and “Hammerhead” by The Offspring and the handful of songs where Christian contemporary rock artists accidentally played something with balls. I turned to other types of darkness in lieu of the heaviness.

Steve Taylor was my introduction to censorship. A pioneer of Christian alternative rock, Taylor wrote many of my favorite songs when all I had was the radio, a fact I didn’t learn until many years later when I learned that bands didn’t always write their own material. Newsboys, an evangelical rock band that was very popular on local Christian radio, had an entire verse struck from a song on account of the phrase “shoveling elephant dung”, a line penned by Steve Taylor. Like a dutiful student of things I wasn’t supposed to learn, I quickly pulled back out Taylor albums from my father’s collection and looked for more. Turns out, Taylor was strictly censored in ye olden days for writing biting satire, culminating in a soft excommunication from Christian rock, hence explaining writing for another from the sidelines. I personally attuned to his song “Am I in Sync?”, for reasons obvious today but mystifying then: ominous relentless synthesizers, haunting tales of broken lives, distorted dark warnings in the catchy chorus, and the final bars collapsing into dissonant failure. 

Am I In Sync?

Some time later, in the beginnings of my digital era, making playlists for myself on iTunes to commit to my iPod shuffle, I searched up my favorite Steve Taylor song, typed in “Am I in Sync?”, and to my surprise was greeted with two results, the song I loved, and the cover by Circle of Dust. Significantly darker than the original, I’d finally found what I was looking for, and I was obsessed – fueled by the revelation that my father had no idea that this song was in his collection, a bad track forgotten on an irrelevant Christian rock compilation album.

Circle of Dust - Am I In Sync? - 1 - I Predict a Clone (1994)

I followed the only lead I had. Circle of Dust, a one-man band of Klayton Scott’s, were a Christian industrial rock act, and up until this point the only Christian metal I knew of were Stryper, who, if you’re not familiar with, suck. This was a revelation, and I devoured Circle of Dust, Brainchild, Angeldust and Argyle Park, carefully avoiding the heretic secular music surrounding Scott on all sides. In my first ever discography run, I proceeded forward through Scott’s music, barely understanding anything, until I hit the end:

Disengage refers to Klayton Scott leaving the Christian music industry and the religion itself. I justified listening to it using the same logic that caused Scott’s exit: previous albums’ lyrics were never about Christianity in the first place; some speculated Scott had only been part of the industry because he was first signed to a Christian record label. There were accusations the album cover depicted Marilyn Manson in a deliberate embrace of evil, and the album itself was thought to be intended as blasphemy. And yet I had spent so long looking for it.

Then, this is right? 

No. 

Not right. 

Necessary.

“Chasm” was now my anthem, the same dark distorted warning chorus from Taylor’s “Sync?” were back, darker, more distorted, sounding more of resignation and resentment than of warning, now not pretending the danger could be avoided. “Waste of Time” and “Refractor” fleshed out my new unholy triumvirate, and now I knew exactly what I was looking for more of, my ongoing mission that has led me to all of you. 

We all know these early highs of discovery and escape cannot be recaptured, but this, the first of many, has continued to unfold surprises as I’ve listened to it over the last fifteen years. Like many of you will now, I initially despised the “ambient” interludes (I wouldn’t call them that today), and usually stopped listening to the album somewhere around “Mezmerized”, my favorite tracks having passed and only a deep-seated mistrust of remixed bonus tracks left. Songs like “Yurasuka” and “You Are Fragile” I considered terrible. Imagine my surprise when I learned the remixes formed a conceptual suite expanding “Chasm” and “Refractor” into a miniature album of their own, hauntingly recontextualized and reemphasized into yet darker and more disturbing forms. 

Klayton Scott went on to make music as Celldweller (whose first big song featured the lines “no way to switch back now”), and in his time there taught me much about endless revisiting of old material, eventually reforming Circle of Dust and issuing mostly faithful remasters of old CoD albums including Disengage. His predilection for multiple identities, repeated attempts at metamorphosis, and yet ever-returning to old works in desperate acts of reclamation are likely more influential on me than the music itself was, always chasing new esoteric unknowns and always going back to the old favorites and trying to understand that uncapturable magic that was there the first time. 

Disengage, an instruction neither Scott nor I followed, brings me back to that confluence of secrecy, escape, darkness, and heavy music, an album that is part of me, and the years I’ve spent listening show me I share the same flaws, a rejection of our own mission statement to Disengage, in fact to flaunt it with excessive levels of engagement, an endless quest to reinvent the self and justify past failures, and an unwillingness to make smart decisions, not wanting to sacrifice the purposefully esoteric. Is it a good album? No, not really. It has three good songs, and a strange Frankensteined 22-minute remix suite of two of those songs as a closer. But it’s more than a favorite, an album to this day I cannot in good conscience listen to, and will listen to again, all the same.

Am I in sync?