Lesley Mok - transient (2026) [Hi-Res]

Percussionist and sound artist Lesley Mok began work in fall 2023 on the solo album transient, distilling several years of sonic exploration beyond the traditional drum kit. The record blends digital electronics, live improvisation, and studio manipulation into a passage through emotional states — like a slow walk through a museum where hidden meanings gradually reveal themselves to the listener. The music carries traces of diegetic film-scoring language, the influence of composers Autechre, Robert Hood, and Ryuichi Sakamoto, the abstract aesthetics of contemporary improvised music, the propulsive drive of Cuban Rumba, and the figurative vocabulary of the acousmatic tradition.
Mok's turn toward electronics continues a line begun on the debut album The Living Collection, where the collective sound of a large ensemble became a single responsive organism. On transient, Mok carries that logic into solo work, becoming a kind of one-person orchestra — exploring rhythm, timbre, texture, and pulse as a way of voicing emotional landscapes.
Acoustic drums on the record sit alongside the electronics: sometimes heavily transformed and abstracted, sometimes recognizable in their natural voice. The electronics form an enclosed inner space, while the drums act as a "live witness," confronting the listener with reality. This inner tension between the personal and the observed world underlies the album's extended sonic passages, leaving a restrained yet deeply personal sense of distance — as if the listener stands near the work's magnetic field rather than at its center. Without a prescribed arc, transient recreates the randomness and complexity of daily life, where humor, gravity, irony, and darkness pass through one another as naturally as warm, dark water inviting you to wade in.

Tracklist:
1-1 Lesley Mok - berserk [4:53]
1-2 Lesley Mok - midland [6:03]
1-3 Lesley Mok - williams landing [4:38]
1-4 Lesley Mok - in the funhouse [5:12]
1-5 Lesley Mok - weightless light [3:39]
1-6 Lesley Mok - view from above [2:59]
1-7 Lesley Mok - caught by the tides [5:49]