Leslie Winer's 'When I Hit You—You’ll Feel It' (available digitally July 23rd and CD/LP on July 30th from Light In The Attic)
16-track collection includes selections from Winer’s pioneering solo debut, ‘Witch’ plus highlights from her inspired collaborations and previously unreleased recordings
Pre-order beginning today (5/26) and available digitally on July 23rd,
with the CD and three special 2-LP editions due out July 30th
Compilation’s first single, “Skin,” available to stream/download today,
while its rare video makes its YouTube debut
Winer also set to release a standalone cover of Tim Buckley’s “Once I Was” with composer Maxwell Sterling 7-inch due out July 30th and available digitally on September 16th
cover art for When I Hit You—You’ll Feel It anthology and “Once I Was” single (click here to download artwork)
“The world seems finally to be catching up to Leslie Winer, whose startling intelligence and singular vision shine through her copious recording life.”
- Max Richter
Los Angeles, CA (May 26, 2021)—Celebrated archival label Light in the Attic Records is proud to announce When I Hit You—You’ll Feel It: a 16-track anthology that celebrates the extraordinary work of musician, poet, and author, Leslie Winer. Available for pre-order beginning today (5/26), When I Hit You—You’ll Feel It spans Winer’s three-decade-long musical career: from her groundbreaking solo work in the early ‘90s to her latest inspired projects. Featuring musical contributions from Jon Hassell, Helen Terry, Jah Wobble, Renegade Soundwave’s Karl Bonnie, and others, the collection also spotlights Winer’s diverse collaborations, and unearths previously unreleased recordings.
Newly-remastered by GRAMMY®-nominated engineer John Baldwin, When I Hit You—You’ll Feel It will be available on July 23rd across digital platforms (including in hi-res), along with the CD and three special 2-LP editions due out on July 30th. The album includes an extensive new interview with Winer, captured by the compilation’s co-producer, acclaimed author and critic Wyndham Wallace. Rounding out the package is an insightful essay by the award-winning writer and scholar Louis Chude-Sokei, an original cover collage by the renowned British photographer and artist Linder, featuring the photography of Jean-Baptiste Mondino, and design by Christopher Shannon.
Beginning today, Winer’s captivating track “Skin” (off 1993’s Witch) is available to stream or download, while its rare video—directed by John Maybury (Sinéad O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U,” Pet Shop Boys’ “West End Girls”)—makes its YouTube debut. Click here to watch the video.
Also due out on July 30th and available to pre-order today, Light in the Attic will issue a standalone 7-inch single from Winer and composer Maxwell Sterling, who interpret Tim Buckley’s “Once I Was.” The release, which also includes Buckley’s original 1967 version, marks the latest title from the label’s exclusive vinyl and digital cover singles series, in which contemporary artists cover classic songs from the Light in the Attic catalog. On September 16th, the single will also be available across digital platforms. Past releases from LITA’s widely popular series include covers from the one-and-only Iggy Pop with the Zig Zags transforming Betty Davis’ dirty funk into a heavy Sabbath grind, and Toronto’s BADBADNOTGOOD, featuring Jonah Yano on vocals, covering “Key To Love (Is Understanding),” originally recorded in 1982 by Milwaukee’s funk/soul pioneers Majestics. Click here to revisit past singles from the series.
More about Leslie Winer….
Musician, poet, iconoclast, model, artist, enigma. Leslie Winer is many things.
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.
On her debut, Witch, Winer masterfully blended the uninhibited sampling of early hip-hop with dancehall basslines and programmed beats, while weaving mesmerizing—and coolly-detached—spoken-word vocals into her ambient tracks. It was unorthodox in the most delicious ways. The album was a bold experiment by the self-taught artist, who enlisted a number of talented musicians in the sessions, including Culture Club’s Helen Terry, Karl Bonnie of Renegade Soundwave, former Public Image Ltd. bassist Jah Wobble, and Kevin Mooney, as well as Marco Pirroni and Matthew Ashman (both of Adam and the Ants, among other acts).
While Witch was finished in 1990, it wouldn’t be released for three years, due to the whims of Winer’s label. In the meantime, several tracks made their way out into the world as early as June 1990, thanks to BBC Radio 1 DJ John Peel, who later referred to Witch as “the definition of a hidden gem.”
Opening with the laid-back dub beats and soft, sing-songy chorus of “He Was,” Witch features such highlights as the up-tempo “Skin,” the hypnotic, bass-heavy “The Boy Who Used 2 Whistle,” and the album’s closer, “Dream 1,” in which waves of reverb-soaked vocals bounce from one ear the other.
While sonically, Winer was breaking new ground, she was also bringing a fresh, incendiary take on what it means to be a woman in the music business, as embodied by her composition “N1 Ear,” in which she delivers a scorching, feminist manifesto, borrowed from the Women's Liberation Broadsheet: “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 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.”
Winer had every right to vent her frustrations as a woman in music. Despite her fierce demeanor and steadfast focus, she was consistently disregarded and typecast by the industry. Many of her early collaborators failed to credit her work, while others simply overlooked her influence. Witch, for example, was so delayed that by the time the album saw the light of day (released under the pseudonym “©”), trip-hop was gaining mainstream traction via acts like Portishead, Massive Attack, and Madonna. Although Winer eventually gained wider acknowledgment (prompting the NME to give her the dubious distinction of “The Grandmother of Trip-Hop”), Witch initially went sorely unnoticed.
Following the disappearance of Witch, Winer continued to record, undeterred by the elusive nature of mainstream success in the modern music business. Her network of inspired collaborators continued to grow and expand, yet her influence remained largely a secret except to those in the know, such as Grace Jones and Sinead O’Connor, who would cover her songs.
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.
In the modern era, one is hard-pressed to find an artist who continues to push the creative envelope as much as Winer does. And yet, three decades after her revolutionary debut, her work remains just as startling and fresh.
Winer’s influence might best be summed by the award-winning composer Max Richter, who offered the following thoughts to Wyndham Wallace for his 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.”
The 2-LP version is available in three special editions: Standard Edition (pressed on black wax), Light in the Attic 20th Anniversary Color Edition (pressed on pink moon phase wax and available exclusively at LightInTheAttic.net), and a Special Color Edition (pressed on cloudy clear light blue wax and available at record stores).
Tracklist - When I Hit You—You'll Feel It:
Side A
1. When I Was Walt Whitman
2. N1 Ear
3. Tree
4. Personals (Jon Hassell & Bluescreen featuring Leslie Winer)
Side B
1. Dream 1
2. Dunderhead (Purity Supreme)
3. The Boy Who Used 2 Whistle
4. Hold On Postcards*
Side C
1. He Was
2. RoundUp Ready*
3. Skin
4. Box
Side D
1. This Blank Action (Diamond Version featuring Leslie Winer)
2. Battle Porn
3. Woodshedded (Leslie Winer & Jay Glass Dubs)
4. Fragment #2 (Leslie Winer & Mari G. Mooney)*
* Previously unreleased
About Light in the Attic:
Known for their grassroots success with Rodriguez, the reclusive singer-songwriter whose unlikely story of personal triumph received long-overdue worldwide acclaim in the Academy Award®-winning documentary Searching For Sugar Man, Light in the Attic has gone on to garner nominations for multiple GRAMMY Awards, including one for Best Historical Album (2015) for Native North America (Vol. 1). Their exuberance and dedication to spreading joy through music has propelled them through the release of 200+ titles worldwide, setting the pace for reissue labels and the archival process. From D’Angelo to Donnie & Joe Emerson, Sixto Rodriguez to Serge Gainsbourg, Betty Davis to Karen Dalton, Lewis to Lifetones, the list goes on and on.
Light in the Attic is co-owned and operated by co-founders and high school friends Matt Sullivan and Josh Wright. In addition to the label’s acclaimed output, the company also distributes for nearly 150 record labels. In 2010, LITA expanded from their native Seattle by opening offices in Los Angeles, including a successful music house focused on licensing for film, television and advertisements, along with music supervision. Light in the Attic also operates a thriving physical brick and mortar record store in the KEXP Gathering Space in Seattle. For more info, visit LightInTheAttic.net and follow on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and Spotify.
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