- A career-spanning compilation looking over the visionary work of the "grandmother of trip-hop."
- It was her voice that drew me in, and that keeps me captivated. "I met this boy, sitting right there where you are now," goes Leslie Winer's heavy-lidded sing-speak at the start of "The Boy Who Used 2 Whistle," before shuffling downtempo beats, a joyful, chanted chorus, a dub bassline and even the computerized "Sleng Teng" riddim enter the mix. This is the strange alchemy at work on Leslie Winer's Witch, released in 1993, four years after it was recorded. It sounds impossibly cool to this day.
Winer was a natural fit for the role of sunglass-wearing disembodied mystic, a dub poet toasting ecstatic over meticulously edited proto trip-hop beats. Her life story is told in luxuriating detail in the booklet that accompanies this new, career-spanning retrospective on Light In The Attic, When I Hit You - You'll Feel It. Winer's biography is the stuff of outlandish fiction. Sold to her adoptive mother as a baby for $10,000. Mentee of William Burroughs. Lover of Basquiat. Androgyne supermodel starring in campaigns for Dior, Yohji Yamamoto, Comme des Garçons and Jean Paul Gaultier. Songwriter for Sinead O'Connor and Grace Jones. Broke mother of five scavenging the local dump. Winer was all of these things, and still makes music to this day, living the quiet life of a reclusive writer and artist in a former presbytère in France.
Somehow, all and none of this startling story comes across in Winer's music. On the excellent "Tree," over a loping Indian Raga-infused Britpop beat, she snarls, "give me an inch and I'll pluck out your heart." On the poignant "Hold On Postcards," Winer's cigarette-aged voice runs through a luxurious travelogue—"We're at the Hotel Alcazar / Getting a tan / Really nice"—over a sad piano and a dulcet backing vocal. She sounds like she's sleeptalking. On the excellent "Roundup Ready," a twangy sampladelic track, a nagging voice says three times, "Please don't become a hoarder, mom."
Just as often, Winer is playing a character far removed from herself, or employing abstract cut-up methods and other visionary techniques for tantalizingly imperceptible passages. On "Dunderhead," a track Winer made in 2011 with Christophe Van Huffel at Purity Supreme, Winer cosplays as some vile cowboy: "I've got a couple of drops of Indian blood... mostly on my hands."
The lyrics on the incredible Witch track "N1 Ear," where bassist Jah Wobble approximates a Larry Levan dub, were taken from a Women's liberation broadsheet penned in 1975. "And if I love a woman it's because I can't get a real man or it's for his enjoyment / And if I ask my doctor too many questions I'm neurotic and need pills / Because I still can't get a safe birth control while some fucker's roaming the moon."
Due to a delayed label merger, Witch circulated on white-labels and promotional copies. At the time of recording, Winer's mix of downtempo beats, dub and spoken-word would have had few antecedents, though when it was officially released, trip-hop was in full swing. Heads still picked up on Witch, though. When Winer was living in Florida, a KCRW radio DJ introduced the album to a label A&R, which eventually led to Winer signing a deal with Geffen. That too fizzled out. There's some temptation to imagine a separate reality where Winer is a household figure in '90s art pop and downtempo music, but perhaps that's missing the point. Winer is a visionary artist who never fit in. Her music was and is for the cognoscenti, made clear by the recent collaborations with Carsten Nicolai and Jay Glass Dubs on When I Hit You - You'll Feel It.
"It was obviously more an art record than a commercial type release," Wobble said about the Witch sessions in a recent New York Times interview. This music is cool as fuck and dovetails uncannily with current trends, but more so than the beats, the samples, the delayed snare drums, the enduring appeal is down to Winer, her voice and pen. "The beat has to be right —or just the right amount of wrong—to be interesting," Winer said in the same interview. "Don't have a problem with the words. Got a million of them."
TracklistA1 When I Was Walt Whitman
A2 N1 Ear
A3 Tree
A4 Jon Hassell & Bluescreen - Personals feat. Leslie Winer
B1 Dream 1
B2 Purity Supreme - Dunderhead
B3 The Boy Who Used 2 Whistle
B4 Hold On Postcards
C1 He Was
C2 RoundUp Ready
C3 Skin
C4 Box
D1 This Blank Action feat. Leslie Winer
D2 Battle Porn
D3 Leslie Winer & Jay Glass Dubs - Woodshedded
D4 Leslie Winer & Mari G. Mooney - Fragment #2