History Dog found out they were a band in one evening. The quartet came together in August 2023 at an experimental music gathering in New York, played a set, and understood on the spot that the thing was worth keeping. Five months later they were recording in Gainesville, Florida. Root Systems, released on Otherly Love Records in May 2025, is the document of that hurry, and it sounds like a group that never needed to invent a shared style.
The personnel explains a lot. Lesley Mok, who plays acoustic drums and percussion and nothing else here, is the composer behind The Living Collection, the tentet record that won the international debut prize at the 2024 Deutscher Jazzpreis, and the drummer in Myra Melford's Fire and Water Quintet alongside Mary Halvorson, Ingrid Laubrock and Tomeka Reid. Luke Stewart, on electric bass and electronics, anchors Irreversible Entanglements and has spent two decades organizing improvised music in Washington and New York. Shara Lunon, voice and electronics, was the vocal presence on Ches Smith's Laugh Ash in early 2024. Chris Williams brings trumpet and electronics. Three of the four are wired; the drummer is not. That imbalance is the record's engine.
Mok's job is the hard one. When the bass buzzes through a pedalboard and the trumpet is smeared into a drone, there is no neutral tempo to sit on, so the drums become the one thing in the room that is unmistakably a body. Mok plays them that way, less as timekeeper than as weather, and the rest of the band leans on that solidity to get stranger. Lunon sits at the center, sometimes as a singer and sometimes as a voice that has been chopped into rhythm. The tone is political without being placard-like; the anger and the grief are in the phrasing, not the slogans.
What makes Root Systems more than a good live set is what happened after the live set. Over four days in January 2024 the band recorded freely, and the liner notes are candid that after two days pure playing had run its course. So they did what Teo Macero did for Miles Davis: took the tape and cut it, looped fragments, layered takes on top of each other until the improvisations became compositions. Jason Nazary mixed the results. You can hear the seams, and the seams are the point. He She We opens with a slow accumulation; Chaotic earns its title; Field Recordings works with the ambient noise most bands would edit out. Hilarity and Hilarious bookend the middle of the record like two answers to the same joke.
None of this is jazz in the sense of a head, solos and a head, and it is not a noise record either. It is four people who trust each other more than a plan, letting the studio be the fifth member. For a first meeting, that is a remarkably mature thing to do.
