Music Videos

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List of Releases

Selected Interviews

Selected Reviews

Kraus :: Fire! Water! Air! Kraus!

"For neophytes, "Fire! Water! Air! Kraus!" might be the ideal entry point for this intriguing musician. For long-time fans, it’s the zenith of a maverick’s odyssey of oddity..."

Full review at Aquarium Drunkard
November 2022

Kraus
Grip the Moon

Fine solo tape by New Zealand's Pat Kraus, a multi-instrumental avant garage threat, whose first album was reissued by Ultra Eczema (so you know it ain't hay). The instrumentals range from garage-oid pseudo-band workouts to electronics based mood-splurts and even some proggy spots in between these.

Byron Coley
The Wire
April 2019

Kraus
Golden Treasury

OMA 333 MC

On the heels of Ultra Eczema's reissue of I Could Destroy You With A Single Thought comes this new version of a 2009 CD-R by New Zealand's garden shed grunt-pop maestro Kraus. Less monolithic than I Could Destroy You, Golden Treasury is almost more like a bizarro world sampler album from 1960s Singapore (or somewhere nearby there). Strange ideas of what everyone from Capt Beefheart to Link Wray sound like are collaged together in ways that make almost as much sense as they do not.

Byron Coley
The Wire
February 2016

KRAUS – Golden Treasury cassette (Oma333)

The songs of Kraus lope and wobble, slip and tilt, fall and get up again. They aren’t shambling so much as askew – permanently odd-angled, approaching everything from a diagonal tangent, and achieving a beautifully disorienting logic in the process. There are shards of previously-heard musics here – sometimes Golden Treasury sounds like a 60′s garage-rock band with water damage – but that’s part of what makes Kraus so oddly unique. I keep thinking I’m hearing something I’ve heard before, but I can never quite pinpoint it, and even when I come close, his sound suddenly slithers away.

For a bit I thought I had nailed Golden Treasury – originally self-released in 2009 on CD-R – as the homey warble of Neil Michael Hagerty’s first solo album crossed with the disjointedly stiff swing of Jad Fair and Daniel Johnston’s duo record. But as soon as I filter Golden Treasury through that prism, it disappears – or, really, reappears from behind, poking me on the shoulder, saying stop looking over there, I’m here now. That’s part of the beauty of Kraus’s music – it’s always right next to you, you just have to keep turning around to figure out exactly where.

Marc Masters
The Out Door
25 January 2016

KRAUS (supreme cmmnder)

An absolute mind bender from New Zealand and courtesy of MONIKER RECORDS and of course the artists themselves, KRAUS. The band has been around since the mid-2000s and have put out many releases at this point, but I believe this is only their 2nd LP. And it’s quite a listening experience. An aural episode that wafts between ancient sounding synthesizer wandering, cosmic guitar experiments, and out and out fuzz in your face guitar shred is what you are in for if you dare to place this platter on your turntable (or whatever it is that you do when you listen to music). This is a wild record and one that I’ve been playing non-stop. There are no vocals to be found on this thing, this thing called SUPREME COMMANDER, this fried fried thing. This is a record made by folks steeped in experimental and underground music, clearly having been influenced by many strains of separate strange from all over the world, and time.The atmosphere presented here is both free and deeply polluted, a place I need to be, but know to be deeply corrupted. Yeah. The best moments here are when the influences sprayed across these 12 tracks collide full on, folding in on each other a bit. “Flute” stretches out early with fried guitar wilding out in the sweetest way possible over some distant drum thump. Only then does drunken synth emerge, pushing the drums more out front, slithering and slathering it’s electronic slime in every direction. Heady jam. Something here for the psych heads, the experimental weirdos, and the synth obsessed, and maybe even beyond that. Certainly an early contender for best of lists in my book.

Boston Hassle
9 April 2013

Kraus
Supreme Commander

Kraus are fucking weirdos. Supreme Commander’s jacket looks like the cover from Neil Norman’s Greatest Science Fiction Hits colliding with ancient, Neptune-exclusive minerals, but its tunes, while spacey in nature, aren’t from a galaxy far, far away unless the year is 1982 or so. Rather than employ modern technology to sound of-the-moment, Kraus seem bent on achieving the gist of lonely moon-beats being blasted to bits by guitar yawns and lazy lazers. Recklessly lay endless streams of digital bloopery that sound the way Tron’s grids look overtop and you’ve come a long way to achieving the Supreme Commander sound.

It’s not that simple, of course. Like most effective audio communicators of their ilk, Kraus appeal to us because they render ineptness alluring, turning stumbles into memorable moments, small warps into artful decorations, and obnoxious squeaks into sonic bliss. At times, it could be argued this is just another one of those records wherein a few dudes are piling aural debris sky-high in a walk-in closet in NZ somewhere, and maybe that’s how this thing was made. But Blues Control this ain’t. There’s enough innovation and careful obfuscation within the folds of Supreme Commander to tire out a thousand wagging Ducktails, and Kraus never fail to choose mystery over instant rewards, gaunt skeletons over fully fleshed beings.

You might call Kraus the Pumice of the more-violent-than-you’d-think earth’s core or a natural continuation of those early, self-recorded John Frusciante hometapes cool people can’t seem to jerk off to enough. The live-jamming of Side B cheapens what is, simply put, a thrilling Side A; don’t hold that against them, however, as track-in, track-out it holds together just fine. What’s irresistible, finally, about this music is that it’s challenging and instantly enjoyable at the same time, satisfying the academic urges of the no-fun knobs while lollipop-licking the laser lust of the EDMers, whose melted minds of Laffy Taffy need the constant stimulation Supreme Commander can offer. Just don’t expect graphics much further along than those first-edition TurboGrafx machines. Plug and play, ding-a-lings.

Tiny Mix Tapes
16 January 2013

Kraus
Supreme Commander

Kraus is a New Zealand musician who collaborates with Pumice's Stefan Neville in Olympus. Here he combines kook-oriented space electronics with acoustic and/or amplified strummery of a slightly unhinged nature. The effect is similar to hearing two separate street musicians in a low key dub battle that slowly gets louder, more overtly psychedelic and well amped. Corrosive and masterful.

Byron Coley
The Wire
May 2012

A Journey Through the First Dimension with Kraus by Kraus review

One-man band Kraus is a national treasure.

Auckland’s Pat Kraus is one of the most quietly important and interesting people making music in New Zealand. With Flying Nun’s recent 30th anniversary, much fuss has been made of New Zealand music lately. But surely the last thing anyone wants is yet another sluggish and bloated reunion from the Verlaines. A little digging beneath the surface will reward you with cheerfully subterranean and thrilling artists who are actually national treasures, such as one-man-band Kraus.

Although largely anonymous, Kraus is also a cofounder of and former drummer in Dunedin noise rock group the Futurians. He happily makes his solo work easily accessible via his website if you write to him. I first did so in 2005, after hearing a Kraus cassette played on a friend’s clapped-out car stereo. He sent me a “Kraus Care Package” – many CDs and a beguiling note, typewritten on a page ripped from an Alison Holst cookery book from the 1970s.

Tacitly self-sufficient, Kraus masterfully uses synchronised loops, homemade synthesisers and free-range guitar laced with homemade fuzz pedals. This could easily be mistaken as a crude and naive approach to music-making but Kraus is technically savvy and considered. He seems to carefully gauge his very singular aesthetic. Scratchy and beautifully mangled guitars are tempered with a strangely sweet and wistful honesty. Even the stunning cover of his new four-track EP is nostalgic.

The scrunched-up and rinsed-out Let Me Eat Cake is what a primitive Jean Michel Jarre could have sounded like if all his pristine and flash gear was old and broken. Inspired by the historical romance novel Lorna Doone, Pangs of Lorna is a nicely fruity and clattering progressive folk offering. Like a science fiction take on an electronic Captain Beefheart peppered with Krautrock and catchy mutant pop, A Journey Through the First Dimension with Kraus is woozy and hypnotic. Although instantly listenable, these kaleidoscopic pieces grow and reveal more alluring hooks and facets upon repeated listening.

Kiran Dass
NZ Listener Issue 3742
28 January 2012

I COULD DESTROY YOU WITH A SINGLE THOUGHT, Kraus (try PO Box 1320, Dunedin).

The superpowered arrogance of the title matches the pains taken to craft this 10-track instrumental album, somewhere between a pop Moog record and the harshest no wave. Short melodic and rhythmic figures are worked hard into the knife edge between queasy claustrophobia and rigorous brilliance. By turns evoking glam rock and cold wave, Kraus takes up the Crude aesthetic and makes the most exciting contribution in a while to the local underground.

Jon Bywater
New Zealand Listener Issue 3372
25 December 2004