Audiopile Review: The best ghost stories linger in the haunt—the shadows, the existential weight of what might be lurking beyond veiled thresholds—only revealing their full power in brief but potent flashes, exposing us to the all-too-real horror our world harbours. Waiting Room embodies the well-worn motif, a startlingly potent full-length debut that fulfills the promise hinted at in her preceding EPs; Holly (2022) and As If (2020). Kathryn Mohr’s stripped-back, homespun-folk and dark-ambient compositions, steeped in hissing lo-fi ambiance, lull us into a trance with their repetition, only to jolt us with a grungy cacophony before slipping back into the ether. Similar in starkness to some of Grouper’s best work (think the A I A series or Dragging A Dead Deer), Mohr conveys a deep sense of isolation in her otherworldly terrain and ontological world-building. It’s also gonna hit fans of early Chelsea Wolfe, Marissa Nadler’s fragile folk or even Cat Power at her darkest, not to mention devotees of The Flenser imprint—particularly those drawn to recent releases from label-mates Midwife and Uboa. It’s an album where every moment feels crucial, her softly sung or spoken vocals pulling you into the near-empty Icelandic warehouse in which they were recorded—alone with Mohr and her ghost stories.

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 the last days of fish production and other rooms made new with heat and light. This state of incompleteness, of loss of meaning, and repurposing became a mirror of her inner world, her abandoned ideas of home, love, affection, and meaning dissolved by traumatic memories of violence. Waiting Room is a processing of nearly untouchable emotions—of rebuilding the foundation for which elusive words like affection, passion and home can have a meaning weatherproof to and detangled from the direct, physical and emotional violence that permeates our experiences on earth.