The music of Oakland-based artist Kathryn Mohr is refreshing and dedicatedly DIY. Her ruminative work, the result of many hours of walking, intricate song writing and field recording, confronts the dissonant impulses of humanity towards violence and tenderness. 

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.

Mohr comments, "Music takes me out of my body, immerses me in another world the way a film does. I begin and end in very different emotional states, doors open where there were no doors before– that is what I experienced making this record. If this inner movement is contagious, spreads to those who listen, then this was a record worth creating."

Today, the album's first single "Driven" arrives as well as pre-orders for Waiting Room [here].