Kathryn Mohr
Waiting Room
THE FLENSER

Kathryn Mohr’s songs sound as if she’s singing them as the last person on the Earth. There’s an eerie sparseness to the Oakland-based songwriter’s work, often only composed of as few instrumental tracks as possible, always vacant of any percussion. Mohr’s voice, lightly warped by distortion and other effects, cuts through whatever delicate setting she evokes. If there’s one common factor in her songwriting—whether it hews closer to minimalist slowcore and shoegaze or something more elusive and freeform, like field recordings or dark ambient—it’s the feeling that you could find her tapes left behind after the end of the world, as vessels documenting a kind of terrestrial purgatory.

Waiting Room, Mohr’s debut LP, conjures this image in more than just name alone. Like her desolate 2022 EP Holly, the record’s atmosphere is steeped in the setting that birthed it. Where that last project carried all the aridity of the nighttime deserts of New Mexico, where Mohr and engineer Midwife found themselves recording, Waiting Room feels entombed in a very different climate of brisk emptiness, that of a remote Icelandic fishing village where Mohr sequestered. The atmosphere is frigid but damp, constricting but chillingly spacious—yet it never loses sight of the achingly human tremble in Mohr’s voice, nor the tangibly weary grip her minimal accompaniments of guitar and synth hold.

A certain slipperiness rears its head early on: Opener “Diver” steadies itself on the same guitar chords, the mix empty enough that we can hear Mohr’s fingers slide with each adjustment. And then there comes a pause, a hesitation in a chord change. Is it simply human error left in the final take, or the weight of the song’s repetitions about discomfort and disaffection taking hold? It makes little difference. Physical or psychological, both options are a kind of freeze, an unseen haunting whose obfuscated source is all the more unnerving.

For as relatively clear as Mohr’s voice is across the record, her presence, too, gradually succumbs to this increasing murkiness. On “Driven,” her voice is stretched, reversed, and otherwise pulled into an illegible fogscape, all but skinned of easy meaning. By the record’s back half, her vocals recede so wholly that Mohr herself may as well have vanished into the emptiness of the terrain. On “Cornered,” her voice is gone completely, replaced with a droning soundscape where the only grounding force is an intercept message, hellishly compressed. In the low hiss of the negative space, Mohr is pressed out of corporeality and into an uncanny Skinamarink-like void, warping familiar signifiers into terrifying new shapes.

The disruption point that pushes Waiting Room here, though, comes right at the record’s midpoint; the heavy distortion tones of “Elevator” cut as thoroughly as the song’s narrative, describing, in unflinching detail, a limb caught and severed in the titular machinery. It’s all the more disconcerting that this is the only track on the record rooted in a specific setting, one industrial rather than natural. If there emerges any thread in the haze of Waiting Room, it’s the one that this track elucidates: We all drift in our shapeless lives, subject to our abstract discomforts, until what does us in arrives unbearably sharp. The image becomes all too clear just in the moment before our blood is spilled—what follows is only more of the abyssal.

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