Three years ago Lesley Mok needed ten people to say what they wanted to say. The Living Collection, their debut as a bandleader, arrived in May 2023 on the Chicago label American Dreams with a roster that read like a census of downtown New York improvising: Adam O'Farrill, Cory Smythe, Joanna Mattrey, Yuma Uesaka and six others. The nine track titles ran together into one sentence lifted from a Jorie Graham poem. The 2024 Deutscher Jazzpreis named it International Debut Album of the Year.
The obvious next move would have been a bigger band. Instead, transient, released this July on the same label, has exactly one name in the credits for composition, drums, electronics and production. Mok made it in the fall of 2023, in the shadow of the debut, and it sounds like someone closing a door behind them. Seven pieces, none over six minutes, built from acoustic drums that are sometimes left recognisable and sometimes processed until they behave like weather.
What holds the two records together is a way of hearing rhythm as texture rather than grid. Mok grew up in the Bay Area on classical piano before the physicality of a drum kit pulled them across, then studied at Berklee with Ralph Peterson and Bob Gullotti and passed through Danilo Pérez's Global Jazz Institute. Since landing in New York in 2017 they have worked the outer edges of the jazz tradition: Myra Melford's Fire and Water Quintet alongside Mary Halvorson, Ingrid Laubrock and Tomeka Reid, Micah Thomas's quintet, a piano-and-percussion duo with Phillip Golub, commissions for the International Contemporary Ensemble and the JACK Quartet. Mok cites the AACM lineage, Afro-Cuban folkloric drumming and drumline aesthetics as influences, along with Arthur Russell and Ryuichi Sakamoto, and for transient adds Autechre and Robert Hood to the list. Those last two names are the tell. This is a drummer thinking about Detroit techno and Sheffield IDM without making either.
Opener Berserk promises more violence than it delivers; the aggression is in the editing, cuts landing a fraction early or late so the pulse never quite settles. Midland, the longest piece, drifts closer to ambient territory before a kick pattern reasserts itself. In the Funhouse, the one track with an outside hand, carries additional production from Jason Nazary, another drummer who traded part of his kit for circuitry. Weightless Light and View from Above are short enough to feel like field recordings of a mood. Caught by the Tides closes things with the drums almost entirely dissolved.
Mixed by Anthony Cazade at La Frette Studios and mastered by Emilie Daelemans, the record gives its low end unusual room to breathe; Mok also made the cover art. Everything about transient points inward, and for a musician whose reputation was built on organising other people's breathing, that turns out to be the more radical gesture.
