Kathryn Mohr – Carve

Description

Carve is the second full-length by Bay Area artist Kathryn Mohr. Written over the course of five years and recorded over several weeks in a rural singlewide inthe Mojave Desert, the album centers on love experienced as a form of grief, not as an aftermath of loss, but as a condition of intimacy itself.
Mohr describes Carve as an album about how memory exists outside the body, embedded in places and landscapes. It is shaped by her first return to theAmerican Southwest since a childhood road trip at age five, and by the experience of moving through terrain that holds emotional weight long after its originsfade. The record considers how intimacy feels after years of isolation, and what it takes to carve out a life that allows for trust, presence, and feeling ratherthan mere survival. The project took form after a difficult tour that ended in Joshua Tree. Mohr pointed her car into the desert and drove alone, crisscrossing
the Mojave on dirt roads. Months later, she returned to record the album, working alone with an acoustic guitar, a field recorder, and limited supplies.
Following that period, Mohr began to allow for intimacy and connection. The time she spent recording Carve in the desert did not create isolation so much asmirror it. Working alone out of an old, western-themed jail Airbnb, the physical enclosure reflected the emotional conditions under which much of the recordhad been written: distance, restraint, and long stretches of stillness. In that context, love was not experienced as escape, but as something inseparable fromimpermanence and the awareness of loss. This tension between connection and inevitability sits at the center of Carve. Some of the albums songs werewritten earlier, during a prolonged period marked by emotional distance and apathy. Over those four years, Mohr was working through unprocessed childhoodmemories and their long-term effects on her ability to connect with others. The work was slow and difficult, involving a fundamental reshaping of how sherelated to herself and to the world. Carve was mixed by Richard Chowenhill of Flenser labelmates Agriculture. Rather than offering resolution, the albumdocuments the act of remaining present within tension. Carve is not about escaping grief, but about accepting it as inseparable from love itself. KathrynMohrs previous effort Waiting Room received the coveted Best New Music’ designation and a score of 8.4 from Pitchfork

Tracklist

1 Bone Infection
2 Doorway
3 Angle of Repose
4 Commit
5 Property
6 I Do
7 Idiocy
8 Owner
9 Cells
10 Chromium 6
11 Trouble Me
12 Crow Eyes