Leslie Winer - A Witch at the Sampler

Leslie Winer is a tall, angular girl, the daughter of a woman barely sixteen years her senior, with firm literary ambitions (she feeds in particular on Beat poets and writers) and a vague passion for jazz and piano, when she decides to move to the Big Apple from the nearby, if far less exciting, Massachusetts to study Visual Art.

Her horizons open up almost frighteningly fast from the very start, as she comes into contact with a varied range of personalities from the worlds of art, fashion and music. In 1981 she starts working as a model, quickly climbing the fashionista oligarchy of the time and going on to collaborate with Dior and Valentino, earning - at an equally accelerated pace - a reputation as a "difficult model". It's a difficulty that, rather than repelling, seems to unsettle and draw people in like a magnet.

Jean-Paul Gaultier is one of her open admirers, as he would recall in retrospect: "Leslie was THE model. Beautiful, the first androgynous model. Fabulous, she posed and moved like a boy. I gave her an umbrella, and without my even asking, she carried it down the runway like James Dean in 'East of Eden'. Her attitude was simply fantastic."

Winer made the rounds of the most prestigious style magazines, appearing in The Face and various issues of Vogue (including an Italian edition). The world of the catwalk, moreover - at the time still far removed from the money-making, celebrity-obsessed machine it would soon become - was for Winer little more than a job to keep things going.

By the mid-Eighties she is increasingly involved in New York's artistic movements, where she gets the chance to shape her style as a literary author, as well as deepen her knowledge of music.

Crucial in this respect are her relationship with the young but highly regarded artist, poet and activist Jean-Michel Basquiat (who would pass away shortly after, at just twenty-seven) and, above all, her encounter with the guru of gurus, William S. Burroughs, in whose bunker she would spend almost all of her time.

Winer would, however, surprisingly leave behind the whirlwind of avant-garde, alcohol and heroin that made up her New York universe towards the end of the decade, when she moved to England for one of her last modelling campaigns - a job she too would abandon shortly after.

As the decade draws to a close, the triangle between London, Bristol and Manchester is musically incendiary, and Winer's antennae are in the right place at the right time. The now ex-model feeds on dancehall, dub, Scientist and electro, but it's also and especially the encounters of this period that draw her more actively into the British music scene.

In 1986 she works with ex-Adam And The Ants member Kevin Mooney, also appearing on a Max single, while the following year, again with Mooney, she collaborates on "The Lion And The Cobra", the debut album by Sinéad O'Connor (she can be heard on "Just Call Me Joe").

Another encounter will introduce her to the production techniques that were then most "advanced": namely, those of Mr. Trevor "Art-Of-Noise" Horn. "Up to that point I had an extremely vague idea of mixing, of the technique involved. When I saw Trevor at work, I realized how working with machines could be a visual experience as well as an auditory one, something I could and wanted to do myself."

Over the following two years she works actively with Renegade Soundwave (who at the time were recording the seminal "Soundclash") and receives a proposal for a joint collaboration with Karl Bonnie of RS from Jon Baker (an engineer in the Spandau Ballet entourage), who will however come to regret the choice, dismissing the Winer and Bonnie tapes as "terrible".

It is in the Renegade Soundwave workshop, however, in the studios of Mute and its sub-labels Transglobal and Rhythm King, that Winer concentrates her efforts, beginning work on her first proper album.

The atmosphere is informal and decidedly "open", the sessions available to anyone who happens to pass through: John Reynolds, John Kough, Matthew Faddy, and the unmistakable touch of sir Jah Wobble.

This is how what would become Witch took shape.

Much of the work, written almost entirely by Winer herself, is built around the sampler, a machine whose potential as an instrument in its own right she immediately grasps, bringing stacks of vinyl into the studio and combing through them until she found something that "sounded cool". The tracks were thus constructed from unrecognizable samples of varied origin, from dub to breakbeat to Neil Young, arranged with precision and enriched by Winer's vocals, mostly spoken.

A conscious master of the linguistic medium, she manages to give the lyrics a leading role in this discourse. While much of the vocal content more or less directly targets what she will call "the culture of domination-war-terror-death-rape", elsewhere a more pronounced, militant feminism emerges, as in "N1 Ear" (“If I get raped it must have been my fault/ And if I get bashed I must have provoked it/ And if I raise my voice I’m a nagging bitch/ And if I like fucking, I’m a whore/ And I don’t wanna I never wanna (you never wanna, you never wanna)/ 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 I need pills/ But I still can’t get safe birth control/ While some fucker’s roaming the moon”), while "Dream One" sees the resurfacing of an exquisitely Burroughs-esque dreamlike reworking (“My God, the clouds, the clouds/ They’re like dirty cotton/ Armies of them/ Carbon monoxide and bees of the invisible”).

Musically, "Flove" and "5" are in all likelihood the most memorable moments. The former is a deep, nocturnal beat with a booming bassline and barely-whispered vocal inserts, of an intensely erotic iciness (a formula from which Tricky would borrow more than a few ideas), while "5" is an unfurling of loops, samples — including a line from Buffalo Springfield — and plenty of bass (Jah Wobble again), with Winer's spoken delivery stepping in masterfully at the key moments of nine minutes of utterly toxic sensuality. In other words, a preview of the sound of much of the Nineties in two devastatingly effective moves.

The remaining tracks are no less impressive, with the elegant entrance of "He Was" — reminiscent of certain "rag" numbers by Grace Jones — the lustful bassline of "The Boy Who Used To Wistle", the excellent electric work of "Once Upon A Time" (featuring a sample of Captain Beefheart), the surprising folk-pop concession of "John Says", and the Wobble-esque dub of "Skin" sealing a record that is unique in every respect, one that sheds clichés and superfluous frills without ceremony to aim for wide-open horizons somewhere in an unspecified exciting yet no less dark and destabilizing future, of which the so-called trip-hop would turn out to be only the most mature and talked-about fruit.

Despite all its promise (or perhaps precisely because of it), Witch would become one of the most spectacularly overlooked flops of the period. Between the recording date (mid-1990) and the release date (1993), three years pass in a whirl of record-industry indecision, first within Mute, which releases it on Transglobal under the pseudonym "©", then with other interested micro-labels, none of which seemed willing to invest in the project, with the result that the album was released in near-total silence, championed and revered only by a small handful of industry insiders (one John Peel, for instance, was a vocal supporter).

Disappointed, Leslie briefly returns to the States, where she begins working on new material while also writing a track for Grace Jones. The attitude of American labels, however, disheartens her once again, with a jumble of comments and remarks that irritate a perceptive, hyper-self-aware personality ("Yeah, you remind me of Laurie Anderson", "You like bass the way a black guy does", she would later recall).

She then signs with Geffen, to whom she pitches the album 3 Bags Full, another record that would remain forever stuck in the label's limbo of the "undecided". At the same time, Winer collaborates first with Bomb The Bass and then with Jon Hassell, providing some vocals for the "Dressing For Pleasure" project.

Between 1994 and 1997 she works on a third album, Spider. This time the album consists entirely of unreleased material, picking up and expanding on the ideas of Witch and focusing more heavily on a more hallucinated, openly sensual sense of "ambience". Fachtna O'Ceallaigh and Bill Coleman contribute to the record, Jah Wobble returns in a more active role, on bass and even vocals, while production is entirely handled by Winer alongside the usual Mooney. Once again, however, the album is met with indifference from the labels and is released in an extremely limited run in 1999, thanks only to the interest of New York artist Helmut Lang.

That same year Witch was reissued by Virgin France, an episode that only added to Winer's fury: not only did she not receive a single cent from the label thanks to a contractual loophole, but she also found the album released with an unauthorized cover (an artist striking a no-wave pose with her surname in huge letters).

Humiliated and offended, Leslie Winer retreated into the privacy of an apartment near Paris, where she would give birth to five children and stay well away from the musicbiz for more than a decade.

I'll Be Mother

Time, then, could only do justice to the visionary art of this author and former sui generis model. At the dawn of the new millennium, the New Musical Express discovered Witch and hailed Winer as the "grandmother of trip-hop". Leslie Winer, meanwhile, after years spent mostly on poetry - in particular on the legacy of beat writer Herbert Huncke, whose literary estate she co-executes - returned to collaborating with musicians of various backgrounds, from Mekon to Carsten Nicolai, slowly regaining confidence in making music.

In 2012 came the compilation &©, which gathered material from Witch alongside a few tracks from the Spider and 3 Bags Full sessions, while Matmos name-checked her on the opening track of "The Marriage Of True Minds".

So, as Leslie Winer's name quickly resurfaced thanks to the internet grapevine (Quietus covered her, and later Pitchfork too), the artist began a long and fruitful collaboration with Swedish artist CM von Hausswolff.

After a brief coming back as a model for Vivienne Westwood's spring/summer 2014 collection, in 2015 Winer and von Hausswolff released the work (1), an album that officially brought Leslie Winer's name back onto the market for the first time in twenty years.

The two met in 2011 in Lisbon through Tapeworm's mediation, intending to collaborate on a joint project. Winer sent von Hausswolff a series of new voice-only recordings, over which her collaborator would lay down his electroacoustic accompaniment.

(1) is dominated by Winer's cold yet incisive presence, resurfacing in her most fitting role: that of a seasoned spoken-word preacher who has further honed and radicalized her style into a vibrant, severe delivery - at times barely whispered, often unsettling - once again probing the unresolved knots of the American way, state propaganda and post-humanism. "I'll Be Mother", previewed the year before, is the heart of the record, both for its touching lyrics and for its perfect marriage with von Hausswolff's taut electronic flow. "This Discreet Organ" is another proudly Burroughsian number, while on "Can I Take Your Order" and "Weatherman" the focus seems to shift to drones, growing ever more alienated and erratic, as Winer's vocals drift into a lo-fi haze suspended in a void, in a tone not too far removed from the most experimental work of Lydia Lunch. The closing "Talk To Some Of Them" revisits the theme of "I'll Be Mother" in a different key, while the electronic commentary comes from von Hausswolff and Nordanstad's short film "Electra".

Brief in duration relative to the scope and potential of the project (a limitation partly explained by the fact that the work was not originally conceived for physical release), (1) nonetheless remains a precious document, both for its quality and for its ability to rattle consciences like few other artists can.

So, to paraphrase a line from the record that proved remarkably prophetic for our artist's definitive return to music: "The show must go on apparently/ the show must go on, and on, and on".

In 2018, meanwhile, Winer appeared on vocals in the acclaimed avant-dub project by Jay Glass Dubs, "YMFEES".

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google