Teresa Winter ‎- Love Crime (2021)

Teresa Winter lays her soul bare on an incredible new set of raving, UK dubwise styles to rudely and beautifully recommence our Documenting Sound series, bridging some imaginary gap between Maria Minerva, Saint Etienne and Chain Reaction’s Hallucinator.

The half hour / six songs of ’Love Crime’ were recorded by Teresa during the first month of the 2020 lockdown in her bedroom at home on “the ridge” in Woodhouse, Leeds. Typically hand-built with her array of knackered boxes and secretive 4-track tape tekkers, and trading in some of her lushest vox, the album also belies Teresa’s newfound influence from classic dub spirits - as inspired by Edward George’s brilliant podcast series on ‘The Strangeness of Dub’ - which are evident in her judicious application of bass and FX, and quite literally firmed up in her outstanding cover of The Skatalites and Margarita Mahfood’s ‘Woman A Come.’

The recordings palpably pine for better times, distilling romantic and raving urges in Teresa’s patented style of lo-fi electronic mystique. But, as with all her work, any sense of beguiling breeziness is surely counterweighted by more pressing themes of Feminism and proper, feminine pressure. From the temporal melt of her instrumental opener, Teresa appears at her most honest and upfront throughout; meditating on new relationships over proto-jungle styles in her title song and the quietly devastating slowness of ‘It Isn’t My Game’, while her take on ‘Woman A Come’ is intended as prayer of solidarity for victims of domestic abuse (the song’s writer, one of reggae’s first female artists, Anita “Margarita” Mahfood was murdered by her husband, Don Drummond of The Skatalites.). Yet, for levity, the dream ‘ardcore of ‘M-O-E-T’ and the bittersweet ruggedness of ‘fn’ serve to cast more positive spells for a world in psychic distress.