Oakland’s Kathryn Mohr Stuns With Stirring Debut Album, “Waiting Room”
Photo Credit: Senny Mau
The myth of the origin story has a long and uncomfortable history of overshadowing the works it's credited with inspiring.
For years, Justin Vernon had to answer questions about his solitary sojourn in the woods when explaining the making of Bon Iver’s 2008 masterpiece, “For Emma, Forever Ago.” The members of Pink Floyd couldn’t discuss their epic prog-rock adventure, “Wish You Were Here,” without recalling the time they were visited by their tragically unrecognizable former bandmate, Syd Barrett. For generations, historians linked “Wheatfield With Crows” with the apocryphal tale that Van Gogh immediately shot himself after completing the painting.
But at the risk of continuing a legacy that’s uneven at best, it would be impossible to talk about Kathryn Mohr’s hauntingly gorgeous new album, “Waiting Room,” without providing some context about how the record was crafted.
To create her eerie post-rock tour-de-force, the Oakland-based musician decamped to Stöðvarfjörður, a tiny fishing village in Iceland. Mohr spent most of her 30-day stay at the coastal hamlet ensconced inside a crumbling warehouse, which had only recently been repurposed from a fish factory into a studio space for local artists.
The result of that month-long trial-by-ice is a spectral 11-track album marked by negative space, absent melodies and cavernous atmospherics. “Waiting Room” is a ghostly, oddly thrilling experience and the warehouse is its omnipresent co-creator.
“I’ve always been really drawn to abandoned buildings,” said Mohr, who will perform at Indexical in Santa Cruz on Saturday, March 22. “I have a real affinity with the energy that’s left there. I wanted to capture what I felt like was a really unique and beautiful situation. It was an opportunity to document a place, while also writing songs that were inside of me, because I felt like I had a lot of songs to get out.”
A native of the South Bay, Mohr has been creating atonal, challenging no-wave music for the past half decade, pulling from disparate sources like Sovietwave and Yoko Ono’s primal scream endeavors.
Eventually, a demo of hers made its way to Jonathan Tuttle, the owner of the venerable San Francisco music label The Flenser. Home to an array of virtuosic black metal, darkwave and other left-of-the-dial outfits, there could not be a label in America more suited for Mohr’s talents.
Through The Flenser, Mohr connected with ambient drone specialist Madeline Johnston of Midwife. In 2022, the two decamped to Johnston’s isolated farmhouse in New Mexico to record Mohr’s stirring EP, “Holly,” setting a precedent of sorts for the secluded creative process that powers “Waiting Room.”
Because, make no mistake about it, it’s difficult to imagine this record being made anywhere else. After hearing about the fish factory from a friend who is a visual recording artist, Mohr arrived in Iceland with a rough sketch of songs she wanted to record. However, she abandoned those ideas early on in the process, instead opening herself up to the inspirations of her Iceland environs.
“I scrapped everything I had and really just had no expectations of myself,” said Mohr. “I flipped a switch in my brain and said, ‘I don’t have to do anything, I don’t have to make music.’ And once I did that, I sat down and started writing. There was this sort of emptiness in my mental space—I was very alone and isolated. There was nobody. I just embraced that feeling.”
Empty noise brims throughout the record—every missing note hums with tape hiss or pulsing feedback. That ghostly apparition is a character that recurs throughout “Waiting Room,” a lurking specter hiding in the recesses of the vast, cavernous industrial plant. You can practically see the wintry breath that accompanies each song.
Mohr recorded nearly the entire record in a large windowless room, and that harshness bleeds into the songs. “Diver,” the album opener, is an austere acoustic number, with Mohr’s simple guitar strumming rising barely above her voice, which mordantly repeats, “This comfort/Discomfort is bad for your health /but what can we do / when it comes to you?”
“Driven” follows much of the same pace, a brooding elegy where Mohr’s voice sounds like it’s carried off in the wind and “Petrified” is an ambling anti-folk number—a Julien Baker-inflected piece that has been plunged into cold, dark waters.
For “Waiting Room,” Mohr mostly eschews the analog synth and electronica-infused pieces of her earlier work, instead relying on quiet acoustic guitars and strange sonic manipulations. On “Take It” and “Elevator” the guitars are louder and noisier, but the album is mostly marked by its somberness and discomfiting placidity. The most notable contributions are the field recordings of the warehouse and the Icelandic countryside captured by Mohr.
“It was really magical to be able to record all those sounds,” said Mohr. “There’s the wind and the water, but also this buzzing fluorescent light. I always listen to shortwave radio whenever I’m recording, and I was able to incorporate that as well.”
Elements of Grouper, Slint and a host of bands from The Flenser can be heard in “Waiting Room,” but the vibe is unmistakably Mohr’s. While she acknowledges the profundity and brilliance of those artists, Mohr said she typically avoids listening to those musicians when making albums.
“I love those bands. I love Grouper—I love her [Liz Harris] methodology and the beauty of her music,” said Mohr. “But I can’t really listen to it too much, because it makes me so emotional and sad. I need music that takes me away from my emotions.”
While she might not take direct inspiration from those acts, she manages to attain the same elusive goal of those outfits—to create beauty from darkness.
“Waiting Room” is a sad, unnerving record, but there are countless moments of unmistakable reverie contained within its unforgiving settings. Like witnessing the gnarled, glazed branches of a tree after an ice storm or appreciating the crumbling grandeur of post-industrial landscapes, “Waiting Room” is a pursuit to find grace in the unconventional.
That dichotomy has been recognized by numerous music critics and publications. Pitchfork, music’s most venerable tastemaker, awarded the album its coveted Best New Music label.
“I think music criticism is flawed, but it’s still very flattering,” said Mohr. “I discovered so much amazing music from Pitchfork as a teenager. To receive that kind of attention—and to read something that captured my intent so articulately—was pretty surreal.”
Surreal is an apt way to sum up the entire “Waiting Room” experience. It is an album of vast, oceanic landscapes and cloistered rooms—is it both claustrophobic and boundless.
To find that balance, Mohr needed to travel to the far reaches of the globe. As a result, we are all able to steal a fortunate glimpse into that wholly unique world.
Show Details:
Kathryn Mohr with Still House Plants
Where: Indexical
When: 8:30 p.m., Saturday, March 22
Tickets: $20, available here.