Pudding and psychedelia

Otago Daily Times

17-05-2025

Wonder comes wrapped in Kraus' music.
The musical landscapes of Kraus are full of alien wonder — enchanting, mesmeric and frequently disconcerting. Pat Kraus, the man behind the project, guides listeners through caverns where crystals twinkle and tumble, sometimes prettily and sometimes with harder-biting edges; empty and vaguely ominous plains; and mountains swirling in excited flurries of snow. The listener becomes a child again, safe in Kraus' care, wide-eyed at marvels as his beguiling curiosities unfold.
Kraus describes the digital and instrumental soundscapes he creates as "psychedelic", in the sense that they unspool hypnotically and rhythmically.
"I don't like to be tied to a certain genre," Kraus says.
The umbrella of psychedelia is broad enough to leave him free to explore his wide palette of influences — including polyrhythmic Southeast Asian and West African folk music, Japanese court music and medieval traditions — all filtered through a deep knowledge and love of the contemporary avant-garde.
Kraus prefers directness in his compositions.
"There's music that's washed out with reverb and impressionistic, and I'm not particularly interested in that," he says. "I like it raw and in your face, with lots of details."
And despite the myriad exotic influences his music draws from, his music is not "difficult" or inaccessible; Kraus is making music for the people. He has a predilection for a pentatonic melody: a simple and pleasing scale used across many cultures.
Kraus cut his musical teeth as a student in Ōtepoti, when he bought a guitar with his student loan. "I probably practised to the detriment of my studies," he admits. Although Tāmaki Makaurau has been his home for over 20 years, Kraus says having his musical start in Ōtepoti was crucial.
"The whole environment was steeped in music," he says.
Initially playing in noisy, avant-garde bands like The Aesthetics and The Futurians, Kraus released his first solo album, Joy , in 2002, recorded on cassette — a lo-fi affair. Despite having released 30 albums since then, Kraus says there is a continuity between his early music — featuring guitar and other analogue aspects — and his more recent digital output.
"It's always been about the atmosphere that comes from manipulating instruments with studio equipment."
In his most recent album, the perfectly titled Crystal Motors (2023), Kraus created a world both organically crystalline and inhumanly mechanised. In the title track motors clang and wheeze in the background, as crystal overgrowth spreads unchecked. Pitch shifts bend the listener sickeningly downwards before resurfacing them into the fresh and busy upper realms.
Proceeds from the album went to UNRWA to support its work in the Palestinian territories.
The titles of Kraus' songs and albums are always revealing; the instrumental nature of the music means they do a lot of heavy lifting.
"There's not a way into the music without the title; it invokes an image, provides a setting," Kraus says.
Themes recur and morph — horses, mountains, castles, blood, ice and pudding. These elements form the basis of a new library of Krausean building blocks that he constantly reconfigures, tangram-like. The titles are beautiful in the same way his music is — striking and somehow both ominous and playful; A Giant Egg Drifts Ashore , Hastening from Pudding Egg Castle and A Great Black Horse Covered in Silk . His favourite images are those that straddle the line between the beautiful and the absurd.
"Like horses — they're very mysterious and beautiful," Kraus says. "But they're also comical with their manes and weird faces — romantically beautiful and absurd."
This predilection is unmistakable in his 2023 album Seahorse Wedding (Music for Float Tanks) . The album is soothing, albeit occasionally unsettling, the perfect soundtrack for the otherworldly experience of a float tank.
An examination of one of Kraus's earlier albums, Pudding Island (2019) reveals his strong ties to Ōtepoti. The album's title honours not just pudding — a motif he finds both visceral and "Anglo-Saxon and grounding" — but also the small wild island off the coast of Portobello. The cover art (featuring a deep-fried banana on a bed of vanilla ice cream) was snapped at the now-defunct Moray Pl restaurant, The Asian. Fittingly, he will be playing in this same building while on tour, as it's now home to the co-op and events space Yours. Kraus says he's looking forward to his Ōtepoti shows and playing to a city with so many "uncompromisingly" music-focused people. "In Dunedin you can push people a bit more and be a bit more extreme and the audience will get it," he says. "It's exciting ... but you have to really bring it."
It's good to know Kraus will be on his best form for us. The gig
• Yours, Ōtepoti, with This Software is Shareware and B&, Friday, May 23, 7pm.
• RDC, Ōtepoti, with Peter Porteous and Kate Reid, Saturday, May 24, 12pm.