Excerpt from N1 Ear

“If I get raped it must be my fault and if get bashed I must’ve provoked it / And if I raise my voice I’m a nagging bitch and if I like fucking I’m a whore / And if I don’t want to I never want to (‘you never want to, you never want to’) / 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”

After Velvet Underground, Lou Reed and Nico, before Massive Attack, Portishead and Tricky, Leslie Winer has made the first trip hop album. Witch was released in early 1990 in London. It was simply credited to ©. It will be re-released on vinyl by Superior Viaduct on 29 April.

Leslie Winer is an American born poet, writer and musician. In the beginning she played with jazz bands as a pianist, then befriended with Burroughs and Jean-Mihel Basquiat as a university student in New York, worked as a super model in the 80s, went to London, worked together with Adam & The Ants bassist Kevin Mooney and Karl Bonnie of Renegade Soundwave, took part with her spoken words in the last song of Sinead O’Connor’s debut album in 1987, then made her first album Witch, which was released in early 1990. Her main instruments were the sampler and the desktop. (Witch was re-released in 1993. It also passed unnoticed.)  She contributed to Bomb The Bass, Mekons and Holger Hiller songs and went back to America in late 1990, wrote some tracks for Grace Jones and Jon Hassel, signed to Geffen Records, but her second album 3 Bags Full which was recorded in 1993-94 stayed unreleased. Her third album Spider was recorded between 1994 and 97. It was released around 1999 in very limited series by Austrian minimalist and deconstructivist fashion designer Helmut Lang to promote one of his shows in New York.

These are raw jazzy experimental trip-hop albums with spoken words and sampled, dubbed music. Her albums remind me „Spare Ass Annie and Other Tales”, the collaboration album of Burroughs and Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy. On the other hand her songs bring Velvet Underground, Lou Read and Nico to my mind.

Since then there were collaborations with French composer Christophe Van Huffel, Swedish composer and conceptual artist Carl Michael von Haushoff, British singer-songwriter and BMX champion Alice Temple, and put JJ Cale with touch with Samuel Beckett for nothing under the Cajun moon.

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She is living in France, playacting as co-editor for the Herbert Huncke estate. He was a beat poet and writer. Ms Winer reads a short story from Huncke.