Kathryn Mohr : Carve
Place is significant in Kathryn Mohr’s music. With her 2025 Flenser debut Waiting Room, she wrote the record in an abandoned fish factory located in Iceland. The feel of this location seeps into Mohr’s compositions; Waiting Room’s ambient pop atmosphere is confined, haunting. Likewise, for her follow-up LP, Carve, Mohr headed to the Mojave Desert to record the album, a setting that represents part of her childhood. The location and its relationship to her background shape Carve’s themes, as Mohr explores sense memory tied to a place: how emotions associated with memory become embedded in its architecture.
Intertwined with field recordings and electronics, Mohr’s guitar performances create tranquil and melancholic soundscapes. However, her playing is more straightforward on Carve than it is on Waiting Room. Guitar was a prominent instrument on that record, but she explored a more diffuse range of textures, leveraging electronic noise and field recordings alongside guitar to create collages of sound. On Carve, Mohr’s electronic elements and field recordings are mostly part of the scenery as she delivers a somewhat more immediate take on a singer/songwriter album.
On “Doorway,” “I Do,” and “Angle of Repose,” her playing is simple—rhythms ebb and flow with volume and texture, relying on feedback and distortion to build ambiance. Though her guitar work provides evocative atmospheres, Carve eases back on the exploratory sonic nature that made Waiting Room feel so intimate. When Mohr weaves abstract sounds and field recordings alongside guitar, as she does on “Owner,” she paints a more vivid landscape; her compositions convey a psychic feel of physical space.
Mohr’s lyrics build and shape in dreamlike fashion; at first, her words feel fuzzy—the action is abstract—but over time, her words start to form fully realized pictures. Paired the soothing guitar rhythm on “Doorway,” Mohr’s lyrics slowly shape into the rooms of a home: “Center room flew a crow in/ A spark to remember just that/ You make that yourself your six hands/ The fencing around a dirt patch/ Plug up the holes with steel wool/ Sweep up the sawdust spread dirt.”
As on Waiting Room, Mohr crafts her lyrics with an earnest sincerity that takes the listener deep into the locales of emotional and personal vignettes. On “Idiocy,” the somber guitar tone weaves alongside words of an individual battered by their job: “Conveyor belt of a spineless smile/ Idiocy fallen egg / I’m suffering the pain it’s all I have/ A means to ends a landing pad / My heart a fist a rusted key/ The strike that burns will fade away/ I watch him return to his pain.”
Though her technical approach is more pared back, Kathryn Mohr’s instrumental approach aids in her storytelling on Carve. With each song, Mohr offers listeners the chance to enter an intimate setting, wander about her memories and perhaps mull over your own relationship to place and memory.
Label: Flenser
Year: 2026
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