Kathryn Mohr – Elevator

Oakland-based artist Kathryn Mohr will release her debut LP Waiting Room January 24, 2025 on The Flenser. 

The album 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.

The album’s second single “Elevator” embodies this end result. 

Mohr laments, “Young people are exposed to all sorts of media, without reason or care. It’s the same in life— you never expect what will happen next or how horrible it might be. One second you’re watching a nature documentary, the next moment autoplay is showing someone getting their arm ripped off in an elevator. The unexpectedness of horror, how its thrust upon you, imposed, by other people, governments, personal demons, algorithms or pure chance is a shocking to me. Sometimes I find it hard to escape the feeling that terrible things come from a sinister source, something or someone who feeds off of suffering, takes pleasure in it. It’s a really dark place to be, when I start to feel that way.”

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