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Mok, Lesley / transient - New LP
Mok, Lesley / transient - New LP
American Dreams Records

Mok, Lesley / transient - New LP

$ 26.00 $ 0.00
Lesley Mok is a New York City-based percussionist and sound artist. Their work is guided by a continual search for the connection between the mundane and the divine, the experience and manipulation of time, and a desire to capture emotional dissonance and complexity. Lesley is inspired by American experimental music as informed by the lineage of the AACM, sounds and textures from the natural environment, Afro-Cuban folkloric traditions, drumline, and songwriters and composers like Arthur Russell and Ryuichi Sakamoto. Lesley’s ongoing explorations with composition and improvisation are most notably documented in their debut album The Living Collection (released May 2023 on American Dreams Records). The album, described as “an exquisite and stimulating work” by All About Jazz and “a singularly personal statement” by Jazz Trail Magazine, was named International Debut Album of the Year at the 2024 Deutscher Jazz Preis. Their solo LP transient will be released in July 2026 on American Dreams Records. Their other work includes stilled leaf-chatter (2022) commissioned by International Contemporary Ensemble, bird in its chest (2022) commissioned by Roulette Intermedium, pooling light (2021) as performed by JACK Quartet, but I forced to mind my vision of a sky (2020) premiered by Mutual Mentorship for Musicians (M3), and she smashed the enclosure (2020) commissioned by Roulette Intermedium.
    On transient, percussionist and sound artist Lesley Mok shares an assemblage of sonic vignettes suffused with introversion, poignancy, nostalgia, and contemplative observation.

    Mok decided to distill several years of sound-making beyond the physical drum kit into a solo record. Sculpted as a combination of digital electronics, live improvisation, and studio manipulation, Mok describes the music as a passage through affective zones—like a slow deliberate walk through a museum where its unknown sensorium unfolds itself to you. Feelings of being outside oneself, meditations on interiority, observations of self and surrounding—all distantly shimmer in the colloidal fog of this music, within which diegetic film scoring, the presence of composers like Autechre, Robert Hood, and Ryuchi Sakamoto, the exploratory abstraction of contemporary improvisation, the propulsion of Cuban Rumba drumming, and the figurative language of acousmatic sound all coexist.

    Mok’s turn to electronics for this release unfolds in the generative exploration of melody, cadence, resonance, and decay. The record expands on the sensibilities of Mok’s work in their debut record The Living Collection, in which each musician’s artistry is heard in an organically attuned and responsive totality. Mok embodies the large ensemble as a soloist—exploring rhythm, timbre, texture, weight and pulse, and how they can sonify our emotional landscapes.

    Existing alongside their electronic counterparts, transient highlights the presence of acoustic drums in ways that are at times heavily transformed and abstracted, and at other times, more clearly recognizable as their original voice. Where the gauzy and transporting world of electronics represents a crafted internal space, the drums operate as a live commentator, signifying a confrontation with reality. The tension between Mok’s inner world and their observational environment lives sublimated in the album’s collection of durational spaces. Subtle yet deeply personal, there’s a sense of absence and removal, leaving us to feel the quietly buzzing magnetic field of the work, rather than being brought inside to sit within its nucleus.

    Without a prescriptive arc, transient offers an experience that mirrors the breadth, complexity, and randomness of daily life where humor, gravitas, irreverence, darkness and play unfold quietly—like warm, dark opaque water and the invitation to wade in. -James Kogan     


    released August 2026

    Compositions, Drums, Electronics, and Production by Lesley Mok
    Additional Production by Jason Nazary (track 4)
    Recording by Andres Abenante at Jaybird Studio
    Mixing by Anthony Cazade at La Frette Studios
    Mastering by Emilie Daelemans
    Album Artwork by Lesley Mok
    Design by Matt Sage
    Layout by Devin Shaffer

    Special thanks to Jordan Reyes whose generous support allowed me to make the album and whose photography inspired me to try my hand at the album artwork and David Leon whose feedback and encouragement strengthened my confidence in the music.

     

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