Oakland-based artist Kathryn Mohr will release her debut LP Waiting Room January 24, 2025 on The Flenser. The album was written and self-recorded over the course of a month in eastern Iceland, within the walls of a disused fish factory surrounded by remote nature. Mohr spent hours immersed in the writing and recording of this album in a windowless concrete room lit with a string of multicolored light bulbs (which made their way into the album art), taking breaks to wander the factory or disappear up the shoreline—field recorder in hand. What came out of those recording hours are songs inspired by horror as extravagant as limb amputation by a faulty elevator and lyrics as maze-like and misguided as the torturous love and fears they depict.
The album’s second single “Elevator” embodies this end result. Mohr laments, “Young people are exposed to all sorts of media, without reason or care. It’s the same in life— you never expect what will happen next or how horrible it might be. One second you’re watching a nature documentary, the next moment autoplay is showing someone getting their arm ripped off in an elevator. The unexpectedness of horror, how its thrust upon you, imposed, by other people, governments, personal demons, algorithms or pure chance is a shocking to me. Sometimes I find it hard to escape the feeling that terrible things come from a sinister source, something or someone who feeds off of suffering, takes pleasure in it. It’s a really dark place to be, when I start to feel that way.”
During her period of isolation in the tiny fishing village of Stöðvarfjörður, Mohr was all too aware of a feeling of waiting, attuned to all the worm-like emotions and memories that crawl out of the ground when there is nothing and no one to distract. She spent most time in the factory, which had sat derelict for a decade, and was in the process of being repurposed into a space for artists, with many parts left untouched since the last days of fish production and other rooms made new with heat and light. This state of incompleteness, of loss of meaning, and repurposing became a mirror of her inner world, her abandoned ideas of home, love, affection, and meaning dissolved by traumatic memories of violence. Waiting Room is a processing of nearly untouchable emotions– of rebuilding the foundation for which elusive words like affection, passion and home can have a meaning weatherproof to and detangled from the direct, physical and emotional violence that permeates our experiences on earth.
The lyrics, drawn from her dream-like surroundings and non-linear memories depict the disturbing and intricate world of her mind as it grapples with the violence and horror of human nature while in a far away, otherworldly, landscape where sheep outnumber people. Mohr turns the dull discomfort of waiting for nothing into a resource, a spring of creativity and pushes her world outside of herself— Mohr made the album to let go of it.
Pre-order Waiting Room here.
