Review Summary: Legendary highschool girl trio.
They can’t play any instrumental and music.
Real stupid japanese teenage DADA or GUTAI performance.
Superball, first known as “Miss Osaka" and then “Death ***", formed sometime in the early nineties (when exactly I couldn’t discover) and were a four piece, consisting of three teenage girls and a toy monkey. They were the undisputed queens of a little-known scene called “aho-core", or translated to English, “idiot-core".
Superball have been described by the Forced Exposure catalogue as “the avant-Shaggs". I can think of no better description for them. They cannot sing, they cannot play, they cannot write proper music. But instead of ignoring that and attempting to transcend these problems and create beautiful songs as the Shaggs did, Superball take their lack of talents and turn them on their head so they become advantages - their failures were the very soul, the very root of their being, the cheesy all-American wholesomeness being replaced in this instance with an oblique, knowing, stubborn and strangely blank style.
Their concerts were legendary stuff. The frontgirl held a guitar and would occasionally strum it when she felt like it. She interspersed this with a recitation of the Japanese alphabet - something that sounds like “grio" appears to have been her favourite letter. Meanwhile, her two friends would either play piercing notes on a penny whistle, or blow bubbles, or skip rope. Drums would be supplied by the toy monkey, who was presumably one of those really old battery powered things from the sixties that clashed two little cymbals over and over again. Excellently, every so often frontgirl would shout “DRUM SOLO!" and everyone would stop what they were doing, except for the monkey, who carried on doing his stuff. As you can see, they were really less a band, more a Dadaist performance art group.
Eventually though, at some point in their brief career - research shows that it was probably 1993 - the group felt that it was time to document their antics. And so they recorded the masterpiece I own, the eponymous cassette EP. The question is, though, stripped of the visual aspect, can this audio tape “work"? Well, let me guide you through the five tracks here, and then give you my opinion on it.
The first thing you notice about the cassette is the packaging. Each case has its own unique, handmade cover. The one on the Forced Exposure site where I managed to buy it was of a normal cassette label with a passport photo of a young girl (presumably one of the group) crudely glued onto it, with face obscured by black marker pen. My copy has no cover at all - just case and tape, but decorated with lots of red and black arrows, permanent markered onto both. I love handmade packaging - I’m delighted I own something that one of the actual group themselves spent ages putting together.
The first track is very minimalist. Nothing but what appears to be a rice shaker being shaked very, very gently, and frontgirl blankly reciting her ABC’s. She coughs at one point - not being Phil Collins, they didn’t erase it with Pro-Tools and left it in. Second track begins with a low buzzing organ sound from what must be a Bontempi organ. After saying a letter and then giving a one-key tootle on the organ about 20 times, it dissolves into a shapeless “jam", if you could call it that, with guitars being plucked as if the player was on the verge of falling asleep. What’s nice about this and the following track is that frontgirl laughs at points during them. It sort of rams home the shambolic yet endearing nature of the whole enterprise. Anyway, the “song" suddenly stops dead and we’re into track number three, which is like a traditional Japanese folk song after being blindfolded and spun around a few times. It basically wobbles about and eventually collapses in a painful heap. End of side one.
Side two is my favourite. An incredibly piercing penny whistle starts it off, which upon my first listen on my headphones made me turn down the volume of the stereo - and I never do that. A scratchy, somewhat demented guitar piece forms the basis of the track, and there’s a funny little bit in the middle while the frontgirl keeps on saying something and the whistle “replies" with a little toot. Then the whistle starts getting weaker and quieter, and after more scratching guitar and interjections by the Bontempi organ it fades away.
Fifth and last track, and it begins with scales being played on a xylophone, with a rice shaker in the background. Frontgirl starts reciting again, but they clearly wanted a good finale for the tape, so they mix in from goodness-knows-where a instruction record for how to play surf guitar. It’s in English, with the presenter of the record claiming that we, too, can play along with “the Phantom Surfer". As Superball’s attacks on the xylophone become increasingly agitated, we hear test runs on a bass in the right hand stereo channel. Then as it stops, leaving a now somewhat sad sounding frontgirl to recite her “grio grio grio", we hear the crashing waves fade in and a groovy surf tune starts, with the presenter shouting out which diagram the guitarist should play. It carries on for a bit, and then slowly fades out.
Ultimately, it does tend to lack a certain something without actually seeing them on stage arse about. But it’s still enjoyable in a totally ridiculous “*** dance let’s ART" way. I personally find the shoddily self-recorded din of rice shaker, atonal guitar and Bontempi organ quite intriguing, as I know hardly anything about them, or why they were driven to do this. So, judged by the standards of a proper musical experience, it obviously falls somewhat short - in fact, it’s quite silly. As a piece of bizzaro performance/outsider art, however, it excels. (And the second side happens to be very listenable if, um, you like unlistenable stuff.)
So, what happened to them after this? Well, a year later they released their second tape, a video called Teenage Superstar on Stage, and though I haven’t seen it I would imagine it being pretty much the definitive guide to all things Superball, now that the visual aspect was successfully covered. In fact, it managed to get some attention in the US with Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth raving about it to various magazines. Moore was so impressed, in fact, he attempted to sign them up to his Ecstatic Peace! label, and plans for a double album were hatched. But it was not to be. My thorough research (i.e. Googling up the word “superball") has failed to asertain why, but the band split for some reason.
All that exists of Superball now are a couple of tapes, and an Exile Osakainterview (typically, it’s in an issue that sold out in 1996 or something, so I can’t mention any of it here). A band like them could never survive in this world for long, let’s be honest, but it’s nice to know that they werethere, for just a while. I like to think that somewhere else in the world another group of arty teenage girls are doing something just as weird, and that I’ll end up writing about whatever it is they’re doing in about ten years time. Let’s hear it for Superball, Teenage Superstars Forever…
