Listen to Kathryn Mohr’s latest single, “Take It”
The song appears on her debut album Waiting Room— out January 24 on The Flenser.
Photo by Senny Mau
Today, Oakland-based multi-instrumentalist Kathryn Mohr unveils the final standalone single from her debut album Waiting Room, out next week on The Flenser.
Titled "Take It," Mohr comments: "I rarely know what I'm talking about until way after a song is done. Lyrics are the result of emotional vomit and blind scribblings, understanding comes when I get as close as I can to being a listener rather than a creator." She concludes, "'Take It,' now that it's in the rear view mirror, is about abusive relationships, dream logic, dehumanization, superstition, power imbalances, and paradoxes. It's about getting dragged through ruble while holding on to a thread of hope and finally letting go of your own will because of your own growth. It's one of my favorite songs on the record."
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 Waiting Room in a windowless concrete room lit with a string of multicolored light bulbs, 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 her 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.
The lyrics, drawn from her dream-like surroundings and non-linear memories depict the disturbing and intricate world of her mind as it grapples with the violence and horror of human nature while in a far away, otherworldly, landscape where sheep outnumber people. Mohr turns the dull discomfort of waiting for nothing into a resource, a spring of creativity and pushes her world outside of herself— Mohr made the album to let go of it.
Pre-order Waiting Room here ahead of its January 24 release date and catch her record release show the same day in Oakland, CA @ Thee Stork Club.
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