Mohr, Kathryn

Mohr, Kathryn

Carve

Flenser

Carve is the second full-length by Bay Area artist Kathryn Mohr. Written over the course of five years and recorded over several weeks in a rural singlewide in the Mojave Desert, the album centers on love experienced as a form of grief, not as an aftermath of loss, but as a condition of intimacy itself.Mohr describes Carve as an album about how memory exists outside the body, embedded in places and landscapes. It is shaped by her first return to the American Southwest since a childhood road trip at age five, and by the experience of moving through terrain that holds emotional weight long after its origins fade. The record considers how intimacy feels after years of isolation, and what it takes to carve out a life that allows for trust, presence, and feeling rather than mere survival.The project took form after a difficult tour that ended in Joshua Tree. Mohr pointed her car into the desert and drove alone, crisscrossing the Mojave on dirt roads. Months later, she returned to record the album, working alone with an acoustic guitar, a field recorder, and limited supplies.Following that period, Mohr began to allow for intimacy and connection. The time she spent recording Carve in the desert did not create isolation so much as mirror it. Working alone out of an old, western-themed jail Airbnb, the physical enclosure reflected the emotional conditions under which much of the record had been written: distance, restraint, and long stretches of stillness. In that context, love...

Mohr, Kathryn

Waiting Room

Flenser

***ON LIMITED WHITE VINYL!!! The music of San Jose-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—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...