Dark electronic, gothic rock, cabaret noir & ambient: Karl Mohr’s flagship project injects much mystery and high-octane thrills.
The Splintering of Audio-Yo
From his early experiments starting in 1987, Karl Mohr Audio-Yo constantly rode the line between DJ culture and Alternative music (as per the catch-all term it was then, comprising industrial, goth, etc). After the electronic round-up album The Heck in 1997, Karl Mohr shifted into serious songwriting, resulting in his 2000 release, The End Of The Line. In many ways, with The End Of The Line, and The Falls Seeds before it (1997), Mohr had already made the shift to darker, song-based material. The Karl Mohr Audio-Yo project quietly ended in 1998 with the sampler-heavy soundtrack to an independent film, Standard Deviation – this closed the chapter on a decade of over thirty cassette releases, beginning the next phase.
During his Vienna years (2000-2003), Mohr had the chance to work with the MAP Studio team, developing chill house tracks. What began as a work opportunity, ended up as a legitimate excuse to explore a commercial approach to deep house. This resulted in the project Blue Visions, and the resultant chill house album A Journey Into Chill House. The album went on to become Mohr’s most successful and well-received release.
In 2006, Argentinian-born filmmaker Gabriel Teran started to explore the idea of a music video for Mohr’s song “These Fine Feathers”. This video interest inspired Mohr to write/organize an album focused on heavy dark rock and edgy dance floor singles. (Post-Vienna, he was performing with band mates under the name Karl Mohr & The Fallen Angels.) The 2010 album Full Moon Film marked a transition, finally resolving the dark-vs-dancefloor duality by making a proper project for the black-clad material.
As a fun, reactionary relief from the towering bleak orchestrations he was building during the Full Moon Film period, Mohr blasted out his initial Droid Charge effort called Stamina Music. It was specifically designed to be abrasive, unlistenable abstract art music for its own sake. In many ways, Droid Charge was the natural successor to Karl Mohr Audio-Yo. Renamed from Droid Charge to Spannhaken in 2011 due to the blatant hijacking of the name Droid Charge by Samsung for their mobile phone, in 2017 the project was finally renamed again to an official Karl Mohr alias: Rex Ramsa.
With the alias Rex Ramsa, Mohr continues the manic Droid Charge legacy, as well as moving into new electronic floor-oriented territory.
Karl Mohr’s flagship darkwave project includes a menu of energies from heavy and bombastic, to refined and electronic, to acoustic and cabaret-oriented. It flirts with the territory of Johnny Hollow, The Caretaker and the sounds of Dead Can Dance. If there is a central guiding pivot, it is Mohr’s vocals. He is now experimenting with acoustic ensembles and the implementation of the Gothic moods within a torch song framework.
A sentiment of the original Karl Mohr Audio-Yo release, Into The Doomhole, still remains in all that Karl Mohr touches.Karl Mohr dropped his Audio-Yo suffix somewhere between 1997-2000 as he become more concerned with using samplers for dark rock music – in many ways it was Karl Mohr Audio-Yo through the songwriting/vocalist lens. Songs took on more coherent shape, and sample drops became less featured. Around 1996, Mohr started to put more emphasis on songwriting and the musical output stopped being techno/electronica-oriented and started to become more Sartorial. The period 2010-2015 was more focused on goth/darkwave directly, in tone and presentation.
In 2010, Mohr released a goth/darkwave epic album and changed the name of his main songwriting continuity from Karl Mohr Audio-Yo by dropping the suffix. One can already hear this transition as far back as such songs “Waiters” (1997) and “End Of The Line” (2000). In rebuilding the Tape Life archive, the decision was made to retroactively title the early works back to 1997, but inevitably that decision was reversed, and those releases now bear his own name.
Mohr’s dark songs, the alternative musical spaces, cabaret-style piano song expressions are all part of this same universe. His output focuses on lyrics, vocals, songs and musicality are explored. There are many upcoming songs and albums waiting in the wings.
One thread, difficult to pinpoint exactly with all the fracas, is Mohr’s vocalizations which have been present from his first experiments in 1987; as influences he claims: Mick Jagger – his first obsession – Holly Johnson, Pete Burns, Marc Almond, Douglas McCarthy, Nivek (Ohgr) Ogre, Folke “Ledernacken” Jensen, Edward Ka-Spel, Andrew Eldritch and Peter Murphy. Despite the comparisons, Mohr was relatively clueless about David Bowie, Iggy Pop and Nick Cave until quite late in his singing career.
The primary project of Canadian dark electronic producer Karl Mohr gave focus to shadowy electronic work, shifting dramatically in 2010. Like many musicians in the genre, Mohr writes and produces alone, and then employs a larger ensemble to realize the songs live. In 2003, Karl Mohr built up, what would become, Karl Mohr & the Fallen Angels. While he had had various live performances in various configurations dating back to 1991, this was really the first consistent live performance unit. First with (“Saint”) Benjamin Mueller-Heaslip on piano/synth, and then Ian (“Revolution”) Revell joined them on electric guitar; this formation added various members including operatic soprano Kristin Mueller-Heaslip, violinist/violist Amanda Penner, film editor Jeremy Munce on the drums, video artist Michael Plourde providing visuals, Carol Bell on theremin, with graphic novel artist Anthony Haley on secondary vocals and live, large-format sketching.
Karl Mohr & the Fallen Angels disbanded after the summer of 2009, after a number of delirious and failed large-format concerts, as Mohr took some time to reconsider how he wanted to present his music in a live context. In 2010, Mohr decided to retain his electronic bed tracks instead of using a full band, allowing him the on-stage freedom to express with the microphone and electronic instruments. Ian Revell of Double Eyelid was a long-time collaborator in the live setting, providing guitar, keyboard and electronic drums.
Mohr, on his project, in 2011: “We are still finding our footing and musical balance with the new formation, but it shows signs of being a good balance between the rigid electronic sounds I wish to convey, combined with the organic musicianship we all crave in a live performance.”
The resulting album which finds itself in the catalogue as These Fine Feathers (Tape Life, TL 1014), was an experiment in darkwave bombast, to push the limits of idea-density and track counts. Mohr claims this album to be his most coherent and consistent work.
What happens at the bitter end of goth rock? Delightful improvised extemporizing and dramatic lyrics – of course!
There needed to be an extraction of the dark techno, electro-darkwave, EBM, vocal industrial, hard and edgy and loud material from the more organic and song-oriented material: Mohr remains focused on this material. Trimming down to the electro-industrial/dark-techno genres, it allowed for an electronic-oriented, repetitive (dancefloor) song-space between the sprawling art ballads and the torrential bitstorm of his Rex Ramsa project. This project is very active with many songs in development.
Separating the dark electronic, industrial, gothic rock and high-octane thrills from the cabaret, art song and mysterious musicality – the latter forms a new whole with an emphasis on piano extemporizing, harmony from classical and jazz, murky ambient moods.
Upcoming Releases
Many Karl Mohr albums are underway with remastering, but also writing, recording and mixing. New material is starting to infiltrate established collections thus protracting the release schedule. Upcoming are the releases of Iron Mountain, These Fine Feathers and The Black Instrument should be out before the end of 2026. Velvolution has a longer-range plan and is an album of entirely new material – it may emerge as late as 2028, and could very well be the last chapter.
Videos
Karl Mohr’s YouTube channel with many video playlists include many live performances.
The song “Iron Mountain” popped up briefly on the Karl Mohr short-run CD album Iron Mountain and is slated to be released again on a new album through Tape Life in 2018. Check out this official Tape Life music video by director Elizabeth Fearon.
Karl Mohr Audio-Yo was the primary artist name used by Canadian composer/producer Karl Mohr from roughly 1987-1998. With a high volume of recorded output – some 35 cassette releases even before the CD releases, curating and genre-consistency were not at all the focus, and albums often included whiplash dialing between disparate musical genres. As pure creative output, this was impressive and interesting, but refused to focus into a singular vision. Of the genres that emerged, the primary drives turned out to be:
- song-oriented dark rock and sad ballads and piano/vocal extemporizing often called ‘cabaret’ or ‘melodramatic’ or ‘art song’.
- dark/industrial/electronic tracks with vocals
- manic intense overdriven techno and DJ culture and mixing such as that referred to as ‘remixing’ or ‘mashups’, acid house, schranz, hardcore
- dark ambient, slow, dreamy, washed out music
- melancholic mutant house music and dub-flavored techno
In order of chronological development, the side-projects grew into legitimate pursuits in their own right.
Previous Albums
2004 – Tools For The Analog Revolution
2003 – Absent Without Leave
2001 – The Four Seasons 2117
2000 – Vereinsgasse
2000 – The End Of The Line
1998 – Be Careful What You Wish For
1997 – The Heck
Previous Singles
2000 – Unidentified Flying Object
1993 – Famously Famished
1989 – Neuralgia/Mindmovie
Cassette Rarities
1998 – Standard Deviation Soundtrack
1997 – The Fall Seeds
1996 – Blackburst Generator
1995 – France
1994 – Exclusively Electronic Instrumental
1994 – Percussion’s Underground Development (collaboration with Andrew DaCosta)
1994 – The Thrill Of Highway Eleven
1994 – The Four Seasons 2117 (original edit on limited edition cassette)
1993 – Fibre Optic Rockets
1993 – The Sky Is On Fire
1993 – Ripcore
1993 – Save Our Souls
1992 – Time
1992 – Rage
1992 – Foment Soundtrack
1992 – Empty Room Residence (collaboration with Robin Buckley)
1992 – Magnifying Glass
1992 – Confusion Man
1991 – Fear of Small Dogs
1991 – Mask Sessions
1991 – Set Your Sequencer For Stun
1990 – Wince Logic
1990 – The Doomhole Audiology
1989 – Pyrotechnics
1989 – You Are What You Eat
1988 – Wince