Sometimes quiet intensity is called for. Sometimes it’s just the thing when so many other dashy flashy things are in dire need of our attention.
Even when those other things hold no value for our lives but beckon us they do, desperately, to spend our time scrolling for mindless titillation where the best possible outcome is a “Like”. All to avoid being alone with our thoughts at all costs.
Perhaps it’s because Liz Harris as Grouper is never out of my mind that I hear a resemblance here, a familial sound, a familiar mood. That’s a compliment, not a critique, as Kathryn Mohr can weave her own quiet, intense spells.
From the liner notes:
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.
I’m also reminded of the Comte de Lautréamont’s famous line from his Les Chants de Maldoror—”As beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table.”—as that book is also never far from my thoughts with its disquieting ferocious calm. Lautréamont helped launch Surrealism in the minds of its founders and I would suggest that Waiting Room is also a distant relative. Not because “it’s, like, so surreal!” but for Mohr’s lyrics that delight in uncomfortable comfort.
From the title track:
My love is an arrow down
My love is a memory forgotten
My love is a nervous twitch
My love is a way to procreate
My love is a choked drain
