Mizutama Shobodan

A Maiden’s Prayer DA-DA-DA!, originally released in 1981, is the legendary debut album by Mizutama Shobodan: a wild theatrical mix of avant-post-punk material worked out by one of the most uncompromising women-led ensembles to emerge from the Japanese underground. An outstanding document from "another Japan", the album captures the band, the self-styled "Polka Dots Fire Brigade", at the moment of their formation, with the contrasting voices of Kamura and Tenko already locked into the chemistry that would carry the group through the rest of their work.

Across both sides, the record moves through abrupt mood changes - Who Are You? opening the album like a question hurled across a crowded room, the central run of tracks building a kind of theatrical avant-punk vernacular that has few real precedents anywhere. The arrangements are deliberately uneven, refusing the smoothing impulse of more mainstream pop while still finding hooks in the most unlikely places.

Fred Frith, who would go on to mix the second album, remembered the group as a force of nature, powerful and original and unapologetic. Spittle Made In Japan's reissue restores the artwork and includes a printed inner sleeve and four-page fold-out insert. A foundational document of the women-led wing of Japanese new wave, and a record whose vinyl rarity has long made it one of the most-sought items in the field.