Kristine Leschper Announces New Album And Shares Video For “Ribbon”

Kristine Leschper (fka Mothers) announces her new album, The Opening, Or Closing Of A Door, with a self-directed video for its lead single “Ribbon.” The Opening, Or Closing Of A Door is available for pre-order now and due March 4th via ANTI- Records.

“I found myself wanting to explore love songs, and this is really the framework of The Opening, Or Closing Of A Door,” says Leschper. “‘Ribbon’ is a love song that holds a certain tension — it is the taut line of attempting to read the intentions of another, built with imagery of opposing materialities: a knife meets a ribbon, asking for a kind of vulnerability. A suggestion of something new emerging at this intersection.” 

The Opening, Or Closing Of A Door 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.

Of the video Leschper says “This was my first experience writing and directing a video, as well as designing and fabricating the set. I wanted to play with the perceived reality or unreality of a space, using an absolute economy of materials. When does an environment begin to lose its “realness” and slip into the imaginary? There’s something interesting in the posturing of lip sync in music videos — I wanted to throw the microphone out of frame, as if to say: this is not a real performance, it is a performance of a performance, it’s pantomime! This is not a table, it is a painting of a table! Objects come and go, shifting between hard and soft, flat and dimensional, in a setting that provides little more than an abstraction of interior space.”