The music of Oakland-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.

With support from Siem Reap

No one was really waiting for Gilles Demolder to make a solo record. After all, he had already built a name for himself in Oathbreaker and Wiegedood, two of Belgium’s heaviest and most revered underground exports. But after Oathbreaker dissolved—along with the relationship that had fueled its last stretch—Demolder wasn’t left with much except a laptop, a couple of cheap microphones and started writing songs that didn’t fit anywhere else.

The result was Siem Reap and its self-recorded 2023 debut, Now What?. Lo-fi, confessional, and painfully direct, it was the sound of someone picking through the wreckage of their twenties and not always liking what they found. Equal parts diary and drunken voicemail, it introduced Demolder not just as a singer-songwriter in the traditional sense, but as a brutally self-aware narrator — one just as willing to mock himself as to mourn the past.

Wishin’ I Was Fishin’, Siem Reap’s second album, doesn’t lose that intimacy, but opens up the sound — thanks in part to longtime friends and collaborators Wim Coppers (Oathbreaker, Wiegedood) on drums and Jasper Hollevoet (Ventilateur) on bass. It’s not lo-fi anymore; it’s rich, detailed, and dynamic — but still rooted in confessional songwriting, warped folk, and Demolder’s deeply dry sense of humor.

Siem Reap isn’t a break from the heaviness. It’s another kind of heaviness entirely — one dressed in bathrobes and bird metaphors and late-night monologues, holding a mirror up and laughing quietly at what it sees.