The music of Oakland-based artist Kathryn Mohr exists in a liminal space of auditory dissociation. Drawing inspiration from lost items washing up on the shore of the San Francisco Bay, Mohr’s art chases the ephemeral nature of humanity, the warping of memory, and how trauma changes one's experience of this world.

Her new album Waiting Room (Given Best New Music by Pitchfork (8.4)!) —out January 24 on The Flenser—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.

During this 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.

Arci Bellezza