This story aired in the September 14, 2026 episode of Crosscurrents.
At the borders of natural and industrial landscapes two Oakland musicians are stretching the limits of the singer-songwriter genre. Maria BC and Kathryn Mohr have their own unique interpretation of how grief appears in popular music.
Warping metal, radio waves, and sounds of storms fill their sonic palette. And they create on the shoulders of East Bay’s historical experimental music scene. They invite us to search for inspiration in their favorite Oakland haunts.
And if you want to hear Maria BC and Kathryn Mohr’s music live, you can catch them at Thee Stork Club in Oakland on October 22nd.
Click the button above to listen.
Story Transcript:
Reporter: Should we walk down there?
Maria BC: Yeah, let's get in there.
Reporter: I'm in my stompy boots.
Maria BC: Good.
Maria BC: Well, I'm looking at a sign that says, "Warning, deep soft mud."
ReporterThat's kinda like listening to Marathon.
Maria BC: Thank you. There’s slimy sea moss. There's a little seaweed in there. I think that they call the area where, like, you're on the shore and there's all this stuff that's floated in from the water, wrack.
Reporter: Wrack has multiple meanings: what remains of a ship wreckage and in the archaic form – ruin. Standing on the beach of Middle Harbor Shoreline Park in Oakland both meanings feel true. On “Marathon,” Maria BC’s latest record, the singer-songwriter sifts through the debris of a burning world to shape a sound brimming with life.
“Marathon” by Maria BC plays.
Reporter: The park and its small beach sits between two port terminals buzzing with the movements of goods and materials.
Maria BC: I’ve always been drawn to water since I was a kid, and I feel both clarity and mystery when I'm near water and find it connects me to things that I'm trying to access, so I think that that comes through in the music.
Reporter: The fusion of waves crashing on the shore with the angular tones of industry capture an Oakland of two worlds: accessible natural beauty and the realities of an industrial economy. Maria BC’s song “May This Rain”, reflects the harsh reality that economic value is created through human & environmental ruin. In their intimate falsetto Maria BC sings, “Watching as I watch / Images of loss rerun [and ...] Empire’s fever blooms, May this reign end soon.” As I hear these lines I, too, am a witness, my memory awash with the horrors that feel all too common to see today.
Maria BC: It is something to try to bear witness, especially from afar, and it is about genocide, and it is about Gaza, and it's also about extraction and destruction. That's a theme that comes up in a lot of ways in my music, is the anxiety of witnessing other people suffering and pain.
Reporter: As we stand overlooking the San Francisco Bay I asked Maria BC if the things we’ve witnessed haunt us and how to come to terms with that feeling.
Maria BC: For me it's less about living with all these different haunted feelings inside me than it is about, like, where is it going and what are you doing with it?
Reporter: In Oakland, I often feel paralyzed by the banality of pain. Witnessing the plights of more than four thousand people living on the street, or the environmental damage from a port fire can at times feel overwhelming. You can let that hurt consume you, like the waves crashing on the shore. Maria BC, however, finds creating poignant work requires a willingness to surrender to that tide.
MARIA BC: When you’re feeling inspired, it feels kind of like going underwater, like being submerged.
Sounds of a chain dragging against metal.
Kathryn Mohr: So I have a metal chain that I found somewhere and some slag, which is just metal byproduct from either recycling or making metal objects.
Reporter: That’s Kathryn Mohr showing me some of the oddities she’s collected over the years. Other objects include brain scans she found on the street, and beautiful rocks from Iceland where she recorded her 2025 album Waiting Room.
Kathryn Mohr: All the urban exploring I do, finding a place in a state of decay is kind of a meditation for me because everything is going to decay and everything is decaying, And then, of course, there are bigger scales of ruin entire communities or groups of people who have been killed wars and genocide. I think for many people, it's above my ability to comprehend. But by grasping at these kinds of smaller situations of ruin, that's kind of how I connect to the bigger situations in the world that are going on.
Reporter: I followed Kathryn on one of her urban expeditions to similarly meditate upon ruin. In lieu of her usual man-made haunts we found ourselves at McCrae Memorial Park in East Oakland.
Kathryn Mohr: There's, like, a little tiny canal with a tiny bit of water in it, and it's all concrete, but around it is all these beautiful trees. It's manmade, and it's overcome by nature. And it's pretty... It is pretty ugly, but there's beauty in places like this.
Reporter: Some may view the dilapidated park as an eyesore, but for Kathryn it represents a portal into a different way of seeing.
Kathryn Mohr: Even sometimes when I'm underneath these, like, tunnels that go under the highway, you know, you hear the crazy sounds of, like, trucks going over above you. But there is a stillness in that noise.
Reporter: “Like sunlight in a dusty room, my heart has enough for two, let's go down to hell separately because we don’t want to hurt one another.” Kathryn sings these lines of grief with a smile on the song “Trouble Me” off of her latest record Carve. It is in the juxtaposition, the meeting of stillness in noise or beauty in ruin, that you hear love’s heart beat in Kathryn’s music.
“Trouble Me” by Kathryn Mohr plays
Kathryn Mohr: I think in my lyrics I talk about a lot of nasty, terrible things sometimes, and that's definitely because the world has all those aspects and it's also got a lot of beauty.
Reporter: Both Maria BC and Kathryn Mohr spend lots of time in the fissures of Oakland's ecology: overgrown parks, slimy shorelines, empty buildings. Each finding a different inspiration from the geography.
Maria BC: I think our music lives in the same universe, different landscapes.
Reporter: Their universe is full of portals to the ether of loss that shape our humanity. In that ether, Maria BC and Kathryn send out beacons asking listeners to join them.Critics and fans alike have often described both Maria BC and Kathryn’s music as dark or haunted, myself included. Here is Hazel Cills (SILLS) at NPR Music on Katheryn’s latest record.
Hazel Cills: When was the last time that you heard an album that truly haunted you? Kathryn Mohr's album Carve came out this last spring, and it is easily one of the darkest and most beautiful albums I've heard this year. It almost plays like an experimental horror movie.
Reporter: Yet in the time I spent with them both, I found that their music was not a mourning of the world, but a refraction of light through the darkness.
Maria BC: With music I was really socialized to hear it as a means to access transcendence, but tinged with grief or longing. Ultimately, I write from a place of reaching out for intimacy and transcendence. If that- feeling becomes vicarious through the music, then I feel like I succeeded in something.
