In the modern era, you’d be hard-pressed to find an artist who continues to push the creative envelope as much as Leslie Winer. Three decades after her revolutionary debut album "Witch", her work remains just as startling, fresh, and as vital as the day it was committed to tape. Yet, somehow, she’s largely flown under the radar, until now...
"When I Hit You — You’ll Feel It" is first and foremost a sum of disparate elements: intoxicatingly strident drum loops, jagged slices of distorted guitar, and of course, Leslie’s blithely cool yet unflinchingly self-assured words skating across the soundscapes like timeless poetry—it’s a sonic collage that is both as nuanced and headstrong—a reflection of the complexity of the artist herself.
Featuring musical contributions from Jon Hassell, Jah Wobble, Helen Terry, Renegade Soundwave’s Karl Bonnie, and others, this expansive anthology solidifies Winer’s reputation as an innovator and a trailblazer, extending her reputation far beyond her traditionally accepted credit as the grandmother of trip-hop made popular later by Portishead, Massive Attack, and others.
Born to a teenage mother and sold for $10,000 in a black market adoption when she was just hours old, Winer has always lived an uncommon life. She grew up in Boston with a voracious appetite for music and the written word and embraced the city’s lively jazz and folk scene in the ‘70s. Moving to New York for art school, she gravitated towards a vibrant crowd of intellectuals, artists, and radical thinkers—or perhaps they gravitated towards her.
There, Winer formed an unlikely friendship with writer and artist William S. Burroughs and lived on-and-off with Jean-Michel Basquiat. In London, where Winer began her musical ventures in earnest, she was a regular at Leigh Bowery’s underground club Taboo, where she met many of her collaborators, including filmmaker John Maybury, Kevin Mooney (of Adam and the Ants), and Boy George, who once declared that Winer “might just be the coolest woman on the planet!”
Winer’s striking looks also attracted fashion designers and photographers. Throughout the early ‘80s, she was an in-demand model—appearing in campaigns for Valentino, Christian Dior, and Yohji Yamamoto, and serving as a muse for a young Jean-Paul Gaultier, who later dubbed Winer “the first androgynous model.” She posed for Helmut Newton, Irving Penn, and Pierre et Gilles, and graced the covers of The Face, French and Italian editions of Vogue, and Mademoiselle.
But music was Winer’s true passion and, at the turn of the ‘90s, she would unknowingly help invent the massively popular genre known today as trip-hop.
Today, Winer stays busy on new musical projects in the French countryside, where she has spent the past two decades raising her five daughters. A prolific writer, she has also published two collections of poetry and oversees the literary estate of Herbert Huncke, a defining member of the Beat Generation.
Winer’s influence might best be summed by the award-winning composer Max Richter, who offered the following thoughts to Wyndham Wallace for his extensive liner notes: “The world seems finally to be catching up to Leslie Winer, whose startling intelligence and singular vision shine through her copious recording life. A visionary commentator on the relationship between individuals and society in the mould of Blake or Woolf, Leslie Winer knows things that the culture at large just doesn’t understand yet, and she has never been afraid to let us know that.”
Today's tune "Skin" is taken from the latest release "When I Hit You — You’ll Feel It", enjoy!
More info @
Official Leslie Winer Bandcamp
Listen to ”Leslie Winer - Skin" on Spotify!
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