Kristine Leschper (Mothers)

Kristine Leschper is an interdisciplinary artist working in sound, text, image, and performance. Her work positions itself around the spectacle of the human condition, deeply interested in questions of meaning-making, womanhood, socio-ecological systems, and the wielding of power. Her personal philosophies around music-making approach the sonic landscape as an object with shape, dimension and weight. She has presented over 250 live performances across the US, UK, and Europe.

Out of chaos, the universe emerged, and from chaos a person can emerge, too. Kristine Leschper isn’t being hyperbolic when she describes a sensation of “being born” when a culmination of events, both personal and global, catalyzed in her “an understanding of how to relinquish control in a big way, and from that, a new sense of connectedness, transition, and impermanence.” She explains her desire to cultivate work in the spirit of the New World Poets, where in the words of June Jordan there exists “a reverence for the material world that begins with a reverence for human life, an intellectual trust in sensuality as a means of knowledge and of unity.”

Leschper’s The Opening, Or Closing Of A Door (ANTI/Epitaph) is a paean to the sensory world. It’s the first Leschper has released under her given name, having retired the moniker Mothers after eight years of performing and releasing music under it. Though both projects are guided by Leschper’s idiosyncratic approach to songwriting, they couldn’t sound more different. While Mothers drew inspiration from the stark, skeletal sounds of post-punk and contemporary folk, Leschper’s new work is practically baroque, integrating an array of synthesizers, strings, woodwinds, and over a dozen percussive instruments.