Jagjaguwar

Menu
Breathing and Not Breathing

Supreme Dicks  

Breathing and Not Breathing

JAG155
Released: October 18, 2011

FORMATS:
4xCD

  1. In A Sweet Song
  2. The Arabian Song
  3. The Sun's Bells
  4. Jack Smith
  5. That I May Never Forget And Stay
  6. Garden Of Your Past
  7. Jack-O-Lantern
  8. River Song
  9. The Fallout Song
  10. Azure Dome
  11. The Forest Song (or Especially When The October Wind With Frosty Fingers, Punishes My Hair)
  12. Hyacinth Girls
  13. Ten Past Eleven
  14. Woody Would've Wanted It That Way
  15. Strange Song
  16. Ranada's Demon
  17. The Language You Learnt
  18. All That Returns
  19. In The Whippoorwill's Sad Orchard
  20. Blue Elephant
  21. The Pear Thripe
  22. Flaming Day Of The Locusts
  23. Andy Herman Song
  24. For Now
  25. Descension Song
  26. The Pusher
  27. Hyacinth Girls
  28. Arise! Life Giving Seagull
  29. Talking Moby Dick Blues
  30. Shroud-Like Remains
  31. The Baal Shem
  32. The Searcher
  33. Night At The Opera
  34. Chateaux Banana! parts XIII-XVI
  35. Viva La Speedy Orgone
  36. Synaesthesia
  37. CuChulain (Blackbirds Loom)
  38. Columnated Ruins/Seeing Distant Chimneys
  39. Along a Bearded Glade
  40. Swell Song
  41. Showered
  42. A Donkey's Burial in a Tower on a Mirage
  43. Adoration de l'Agneau Mystique
  44. Porridge for the Calydonian Boar
  45. Siberian Penal Colony (Ode to Joel Stanley)
  46. Green Wings Fly Adventure (Showered Reprise)
  47. Invasion from Mars
  48. Untitled
  49. Summertime (Childhood's Impossible Now)
  50. The Hunchback
  51. Mark's Phonecall from Orgoneland
  52. Leaning on the Everlasting Arm
  53. Harmonic Convergence (live at L'Oasis 1987)
  54. Last Jam
  55. Country of Nuns
  56. Sky Puddle
  57. Huckleberry Fetal Pain
  58. Cows of Light
  59. Careful with that Axe, Steve

Supreme Dicks put out one single in their career. It was a double B-side. Maybe they had a sense of humor, but in hindsight it’s hard to tell.Falling somewhere between Captain Beefheart, Throbbing Gristle and SALEM in the lineage of musicians who’ve found a muse in the nasty, brutish brevity of life, Supreme Dicks chose to cloak disarmingly real paranoia and grief in the contemporary trappings of late ’80s and early ’90s lo-fi college rock. They may have inhabited the same sonic and physical space as colleagues like Dinosaur jr. (Lou Barlow was an occasional Dick, and at least one early Dinosaur jr show was actually played by Dicks in disguise), but they stripped away all youthful yearning and anticipation in favor of a bleak and unblinking certainty. Honest, frank, and free of ironic distance. Obtuse and yet so essential that it can’t help but feel familiar to anyone who’s ever spent a sleepless night wondering whether there’s any point to all of this. And, on occasion, warm, intimate and lovely.The Supreme Dicks formed while students at Massachusetts’ Hampshire College in the twilight of the Reagan era. The campus was a fractured post-hippie free-for-all that many students theorized was a right-wing think tank experiment in pitting progressives against each other. The constantly revolving lineup centered around Daniel Oxenberg, Jon Shere, Steve Shavel, Mark Hanson, Jim Spring, and whoever else was around and willing to torture an instrument. They advocated the teachings of Wilhelm Reich and were vocal about focusing their creative energy via celibacy. This may do much to explain the constant, unrelenting tension that provides the driving force behind the most powerful moments in their music. Regardless of tempo or arrangement, Supreme Dicks songs play like soundtracks to autoerotic asphyxiation, haunting tones that ring in the ears at the moment consciousness is lost and not guaranteed to return.Jagjaguwar is proud to reintroduce the complete recordings of Supreme Dicks in the form of Breathing and Not Breathing, a four CD set that includes both of the band’s studio albums, The Unexamined Life from 1993 and The Emotional Plague from 1996, along with 1994’s Workingman’s Dick, a collection of early archival recordings, and the 1996 EP This Is Not A Dick, which has been fleshed out with rare and unreleased tracks. Also available are 2xLP editions of The Unexamined Life and The Emotional Plague, neither of which has been previously released on vinyl.

Other releases by Supreme Dicks

  • The Unexamined Life

    The Unexamined Life

    More
  • The Emotional Plague

    The Emotional Plague

    More
  • This Is Not a Dick & Rarities

    This Is Not a Dick & Rarities

    More   Buy