I had the pleasure of being introduced to California-based multi-disciplined artist Kathryn Mohr when her 2022 EP Holly was released on personal-favorite label The Flenser. After reviewing the EP for the site (and listening to “Stranger” about a hundred thousand times), I was very eager to hear what a more drawn-out composition from her would look like. Some two-and-a-half years later, I have the pleasure of reviewing Waiting Room and finding out exactly what that will be.

The throughline in Kathryn Mohr’s work, both as a visual artist, photographer, and musician, is the concept of drawing meaning from the spontaneous. Just as her visual portfolio includes stark, Xeroxed images of objects she found washed up on Bay Area beaches, so too is her music built from field recorded samples, drawing connection and meaning to the place and moments in time that shaped the albums themselves. On Waiting Room, these samples come from the areas within and around an abandoned fish processing factory turned artist space in the small village of Stöðvarfjörður, Iceland, where Mohr lived and worked in a windowless concrete room recording and mixing the album in isolation from the world at large. This isolation in a space that was repurposed, in transit from one thing to another, in its state of incompleteness gave Waiting Room its purpose, and guided Mohr down her own path of introspection about the meaning of home, of humanity’s dual nature of violence and tenderness, and of what to do with all this time on your hands. These emotions manifest themselves in eleven skeletal tracks of looped field recordings, soft guitar, droning keyboards, and Mohr’s own haunting vocals, delivering vignettes of horror and affection with an ethereal air. Eerie and affecting, the sense of isolation that created these songs permeates Waiting Room, drawing you into a hazy, psychedelic world where your innermost thoughts are your only companions.

Left to your own devices, the world cannot drown out insecurities anymore; the ominous dread of the dark corners of one’s own mind brings the listener down the path to a reckoning point. Waiting Room reminds me of the feeling I get from watching found-footage horror movies: the crystallization of a moment in time, the feeling of watching around every corner for the hidden scare, even the music itself in its own low, humming way recalls it. Found-footage is a love of mine though, so this comes as a high compliment.

— Vincent

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Waiting Room is available now on The Flenser. For more information on Kathryn Mohr, visit her Instagram page.