Kathryn Mohr’s Waiting Room: A Haunting Exploration of Isolation and Emotion

  • 1 min read

Oakland-based artist Kathryn Mohr crafts deeply personal and DIY-driven music. Her introspective work—shaped by long walks, intricate songwriting, and field recording—explores the conflicting human instincts of violence and tenderness.

Her new album, Waiting Room was written and self-recorded over a month in eastern Iceland. Working inside a disused fish factory surrounded by remote wilderness, Mohr spent countless hours composing in a windowless concrete room lit only by a string of multicolored bulbs—an element that found its way into the album’s artwork. Taking breaks to wander the abandoned factory or trace the rugged shoreline with a field recorder, she captured a world both eerie and beautiful. The result is a collection of songs inspired by horrors as grotesque as a faulty elevator amputating limbs and lyrics as tangled and unsettling as the fears and tortured love they depict.

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