Over the past few years, Oakland-based experimental electronic folk artist Kathryn Mohr has become something of a master in harnessing feelings of intense discomfort, infusing her grim synthesizer compositions with a lingering, impressionistic gloom. If 2022’s Holly EP was wispy, heavily influenced by the gauzy melancholy of its producer, Mohr’s Flenser labelmate Midwife, then her new album, Waiting Room, allows jarring dissonance to metastasize into a vivid, often graphic meditation on pain. A bone-sharp exercise in looking down the barrel, Waiting Room considers what one can do in the face of abject horror: According to Mohr, stare it down. Succumb to it. As the album’s opening line puts it, “This comfort is bad for your health.”
Written during a creative residency at an abandoned Icelandic fish factory, Waiting Room has a distinctive filmic quality. One easily visualizes the isolation; field recordings of Mohr’s own explorations of the area render the atmosphere more desolate than ever. Wind howls and waves crash through layered, reverbed vocals and stark instrumentals, but analog synthesizers and natural phenomena often become frighteningly indistinguishable. The natural and the industrial collide in a way that feels uncanny, even haunted; there’s a dread in the low background whirr of factory mechanics, in the ghostly automated messaging that skips and repeats as if possessed. The spareness of the lyricism only amplifies the album’s feeling of solitude, evoking stories through oblique, terse recollections of fear and violence. Even on “Petrified,” the sweetest-sounding track, an unease seeps through Mohr’s lilting, guitar-driven melody as she coos gently about physical decay and animal torture.
Mohr’s previous work spanned spectral ambience, menacing synthesizer-and-field-recording pieces, and distorted, bass-driven melodies. Waiting Room integrates each kind of sound into something new, merging dark and light without diluting either element. On the album’s first single, “Driven,” she imbues wordless vocal fragments with heavy reverb, interspersing echoing gasps and whispers over a deep, eddying bassline. Atop a crackling drone on “Horizonless,” she stretches each horrific revelation so thin as to become almost unintelligible, save for a devastated whisper: “You guessed it.” Throughout Waiting Room, the contrast between Mohr’s sinister production and surprisingly gentle vocals bridges the eerie and the sublime, recalling Grouper by way of Maria BC, or even Julianna Barwick. The music feels uncomfortably clear, all-encompassing, nearly paranormal.
On the surface, the album is soft; on first impression, one might take it as a statement of resignation. But throughout Waiting Room there’s a tension that makes the music come off fiercely aggrieved: a confrontation all the more unnerving for its quiet, ticking-time-bomb intensity. On “Take It,” the album’s melodically smoothest and vocally clearest song, Mohr’s jaded drawl belies viciousness: “A knife for carving, not for caring—yeah, what a fairytale.” On “Elevator,” another standout, she finally explodes, cranking up the blood-soaked injustices of PJ Harvey’s Is This Desire over blown-out, rasping guitar. As she narrates the moment when someone leaves her arm trapped to be torn off by an elevator door, Mohr refuses to render the scene any less agonizing. Pleading for mercy or a chance to rewind, she forces her assailant to reckon with their own cruelty: “I know you’re looking at me,” she seethes, “you really like what you see.” Agony is no less real than the chilling vindication of bearing witness to its cause; if someone maims you, Mohr seems to say, you may as well bleed all over them.
One of Waiting Room’s strengths is that more tends to be more, particularly when crafted with such a delicate hand and specific sensibility. But because Mohr is such a deft, sculptural navigator of expanse, the less complicated productions feel flat by comparison. Once the dizzying claustrophobia of “Cornered” wears off, the relative listlessness of “Wheel” feels incongruous. As Mohr’s spoken word sways through a loping guitar riff, even the image of finding needles in the sandbox as a child gets lost in an uncharacteristically sedate atmosphere. “Petrified,” though relatively spare, plays up its calmer sound to genuinely creepy effect; the simple angst of “Wheel” just seems to sand down its own edges.
On the closing title track, though, Mohr lays out the heart of the album; her love, she sings, is as much a “rotted tree” or a “memory forgotten” as it is a “train platform” or a “way to procreate.” It’s an avowal of love that exists concurrently with hopelessness rather than in spite of it: an embrace of inevitable decay as a transformative force. “Draining of the Tanks”-esque burbling gives way to synthesizers that seem to emerge from on high, just as her vocals come into the scene. Synths crest and wane, drenched in fuzz, surrendering to despair before catching the last chopper ride out. A more cynical reading might perceive all this as transcendence through flagellation, but it seems more likely Mohr is asking us to keep swimming up to the surface: to recognize that our lungs are on fire, that this is really still happening.
