Queen City Sounds and Art

Kathryn Mohr is a songwriter, composer and visual artist based in Oakland, California. She is a relative late-comer to making music first experimenting with drawing and painting. She acquired her first guitar at age 20. Sigur Ros was the band that got her into more experimental music in her teens and the first concert she witnessed at an Outside Lands festival appearance. Mohr became aware that a guitar could be used like a synthesizer when used unconventionally as she had heard in Sigur Ros and later in Grouper. In 2018/2019 Mohr started recording on her phone but in 2020 she felt the strong urge to make an album resulting in As If. That tape opened up opportunities for her in various ways including having label backing. Around the same time the songwriter got her first synth to help realize her sonic imagination. She didn’t play her first live show until 2022 playing a local Zen center before playing the DIY venues in Oakland. That same year Mohr got connected with Madeline Johnston aka Midwife through their mutual label The Flenser. Johnston engineered the then new album Holly. The record shared a similar gentle spirit and emotional depth and delicacy that one hears from a Midwife album and like a particularly sophisticated ambient folk tape one might find randomly at a consignment shelf at a DIY space and the music sticking with you.

For Mohr’s third album, 2025’s Waiting Room, she undertook an artist residency in a small town in Iceland where she wrote and recorded the music free from the distractions of a highly mediated modern world coaxing out authentic emotions and thoughts expressed in music that is at once highly personal and otherworldly, perhaps innerworldly, in tone and mood. It’s like a lo-fi folk album but blending the aesthetics of ambient music into the songwriting for an expression style uniquely Mohr’s own. A little over a year later Mohr issued her latest album Carve. Once again the artist took herself to an environment relatively lacking in regular contact with any kind of social media, advertising, popular culture or anything like that living for awhile in a single wide in the Mojave Desert. The album has a distinctly cinematic quality and capturing the alien tranquility of such an environment but this time some of the guitar songs are grittier at times reminiscent of early PJ Harvey but more informed by her own style of psychedelic, noisy folk bordering on a left field garage rock. The album references Wallace Stenger’s classic 1971 novel of the American West, Angle of Repose and a node to the influence of literature on Mohr’s music. The album’s contrasts are some of the widest of Mohr’s output and it is at turns and often at once pastoral and contemplative, menacing and caustic, delicately gentle and tense. The layers of field recordings, synth, processed vocals in parts of the record convey a deep sense of place, psychological and physical as there is a tactile aspect to Mohr’s songwriting in every song so the album comes across as something felt and experienced and not merely heard. Written over a period of five years and recorded in a few weeks it nonetheless feels of a piece like an expertly edited film. It is Mohr’s most creatively realized work.

Listen to our interview with Kathryn Mohr on Bandcamp and follow her music and performances at the links below. You can see Mohr perform the first night of Ghost Canyon Fest 2026 on Thursday, August 27.

Kathryn Mohr on Instagram