Leslie Winer was, in the words of Jean-Paul Gaultier, "the first androgynous model." In the 1980s, her angular features landed her campaigns for Valentino and Miss Dior; covers of The Face and European editions of Vogue; and shoots with legendary photographers like Helmut Newton, Irving Penn and Pierre et Gilles. She fell into fashion by happenstance after moving to New York City from Massachusetts to attend the School of Visual Arts. There, she became a protégé of William Burroughs, partied hard and ran with the downtown demimonde of the era, dating Jean-Michel Basquiat for a time. Modeling, however, was just a job; music and writing were her true passions. "The fashion world was much smaller and less mainstream then than it is now," she says. "No one outside of fashion had any idea who you were. There wasn't the big money or the celebrity that occurred later."Modeling also brought Winer to London, where she became part of the orbit around Leigh Bowery's mid-'80s club night Taboo. The city's thriving post-punk and New Wave music scenes provided her with a circle of like-minded musicians, including Jah Wobble, the co-founder of John Lydon's post-Sex Pistols outfit Public Image Limited and Kevin Mooney, the bass player for Adam and the Ants. With them, she recorded the cult 1990 LP "Witch," which she released under the name ?. The album is now enjoying a second life, thanks to its release earlier this summer on the San Francisco-based reissue label Superior Viaduct.

A compelling mix of sampled and programmed musical fragments and beats, breathy spoken word and ethereal singing, "Witch" still sounds fresh today. "I saw and listened to a lot of early hip-hop when I lived in New York," Winer recalls. The influence is apparent, along with reggae and dancehall elements that reflect her proximity to London's Caribbean community. There are echoes of "Witch" in the work of later'90s artists like Massive Attack and Portishead; the music journal NME once called Winer the "grandmother of trip-hop," though she says she's "not even sure what trip-hop is." The breezily transcendent "John Says," one of the album's highlights, appears here.