I love hearing an artist’s practice expand and evolve (and sometimes fold back in on itself) over long periods of time, and I’ve been lucky to have that experience with New Zealand composer Pat Kraus. His singular path continued with last month’s stellar Water Music on Artsy. Synths and electronics bleep out globular melodies as though they’re some sort of retrofuturistic Seussian machine. Aqueous soundworlds bubble up, veering between floating tonal gymnastics and submerged drone meditations. This music is so tactile. It wants to dance at irregular angles and strange cadences across the surface of the skin. Water Music feels up close and personal even if it sounds alien. It’s one of my favorite albums Kraus has made.
Water Music is OUT NOW on Artsy.
(also, full disclosure: I released a very early Kraus solo album, Lamentations of an Ape on my old label, Foxglove, in 2005. It still bangs).
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How did you first find your way into making music and composing? Were there any certain records or artists that made you want to start making your own stuff?
I find this a little hard to answer at this point because I’ve been making music as a solo artist for a long time… about 25 years. Which means it’s hard to remember the early days, and also there’s been a LOT of music I’ve heard over the years which has all gone into the soup, so to speak.
One thing I can definitely say is that I saw Crude (Matt Middleton), a Dunedin musician, in the 90s, and had his record “Inner City Guitar Perspectives”. Everyone should check that out; it was on Flying Nun Records. He was an inspiration for me to start making solo work. His use of synthesizers in the context of weird noisy rock was a revelation to me at the time.
The late 90s was also a time of musical self-education for me that was very important. I was studying philosophy at Otago University, but I spent more time in the campus library reading voraciously about music history, and listening to the record collection there. They had records of things like Stockhausen, Webern, Xenakis, Morton Subotnick, Harry Partch, Henry Cowell, lots of mid-century jazz, drum music from Ghana, Japanese folk music and Gagaku… a whole world of music! This was the first time I had access to any of this, and I lapped it up. This obviously was pre-internet, so you had to make more of an effort, or get lucky, to hear much outside of what was on the radio.
You’ve got a new record out, Water Music, which is from your recordings across 2025. I’ve been really loving this record, and I’m curious about the name. Why call it Water Music? Is it related to Handel somehow? I mean, I know I keep thinking that there’s a real sort of aquatic feeling to a lot of this music, but I’m not sure if I’m just being influenced by the title. But sonically, it makes a lot of sense to me.
Yes, it’s really just that some of the music sounds watery to me! The title is related to Handel only in that I thought it was amusingly pretentious to borrow a title from one of the most famous pieces of Baroque music.
I did an album in 2022 called “Fire! Water! Air! Kraus!”, and I’m thinking of doing a series of albums that are related to one particular element each.
I love the list of things you were thinking about while making this music and want to ask you about a few of them, and where they might fit into this music. So Enya’s castle – I love that one especially. Is it how you imagine the castle sounds that you’re chasing, or is it more the idea of having some place to retreat to?
I recently got a bit obsessed with Enya; there are a bunch of video interviews with her that I watched, and I realised she’s… an extremely unusual person! I don’t know what it is exactly, but she comes across as VERY detached, distant, and ethereal. Distinctly strange. She said in one interview that she can just sit in her castle for hours, alone and in silence. I wouldn’t say that I identify with her, or even enjoy her music particularly, but the idea of sitting in a castle making weird music, detached from the world, is quite appealing to me.
And what about the sparrows at your bird feeder? I like how specific and small that is. What do you like about the sound of birds at a bird feeder? Does it differ from the appeal (or un-appeal, perhaps!) of birdsong more generally?
It’s more the motion of the birds, and their social dynamics, that interests me. The piece “Four Sparrows and a Bee” was made to attract birds to the bird feeder I hung outside my studio window. That piece is also intended to represent the small, unpredictable, anxious movement of sparrows.
The feeder got quite popular with the local sparrows, and I started to see some amazing things; they were queueing up to use it! Literally a dozen sparrows would form an orderly line on a monstera leaf, and hop into the feeder in turn. One day a bee was hanging out too.
I like sparrows because they are so common; it’s easy to ignore them, but they’re magnificent in their modest way. I think it’s good for you to try and appreciate the ordinary and neglected things in your daily life.
What do you find appealing about synthetic flutes compared to a real, acoustic one? And what drew you to bongos, and bongo-like textures for this album? I think that lends itself to the aquatic feeling of the album a lot, actually.
I can identify a specific influence: Bitchin Bajas. I love that band! They do some nice flutey/bongo-synth things.
There’s something pleasingly direct and innocent about the sound of a flute, a kind of guilelessness that appeals to me. And that’s heightened in its synthetic form. And it sits nicely in contrast to the richer, denser electronic sounds I use.
Synth bongos are a deep part of electronic music history going back to the 1960s, so it’s partly a reference to that, but bongos in general I associate with hippie culture, and heavy hippie music is a big source of inspiration. Lately I’ve been getting more interested in Latin music and specifically Latin rhythms, and bongo-type sounds are obviously ideal for exploring that space.
Finland also shows up in your notes about this record, and this is co-released by Finnish label Artsy. Have you spent time in Finland? In what ways does this record give a nod to Finland? There’s a quality to this music sounding like some alternate version of the soundtrack for a village full of forest elves; I’ll give you that.
I visited Finland briefly in 2017, and played some shows there. Arttu from Artsy set up those shows and looked after me, which I’m very grateful for. I had such a good time! I was touring with Floris Vanhoof; we played in an ENORMOUS bomb shelter in Helsinki, and it was one of my favourite shows ever! I didn’t see much of the country, but on the bus from Turku to Tampere I was struck by how incredibly beautiful the countryside was. I would love to go back.
For years I’ve been a fan of the Finnish underground stuff like Tomutonttu, Kemialliset Ystävät, Kuupuu, Avarus, Fricara Pacchu, Nuslux/Roope Eronen, etc. And I’ve been discovering more recent stuff like Heta Bilaletdin, Piia Rinne, I don’t know what it is, but I feel an affinity with that scene. Their weird way of using loopy sampling- it’s such a fresh approach to electronic music, it just tickles me.
Where’d you find the painting that’s on the cover? It fits the record so well.
I was in a beach town called Whangamata last December and came across it in a junk shop. I immediately was like, “Whoa, a Bob Ross”, haha. And the pyramid mountains caught my eye. But then I noticed this weird thing in the middle distance; it looks like a big blue bubble… like a bio-dome? I’m still not sure if it’s just a painting mistake, or intentional.
Anyway, I’m so glad I got it because it hangs in my studio and I looked at it a lot while making the album. The album ended up being about wanting to escape my circumstances, and even escape my body and brain, and just be an ethereal being in the forest. Like if I could walk into this painting like they walk into a painting at the end of Lucio Fulci’s ‘The Beyond’. But, in a good way!
Most of Water Music, and your work in general, is made at your home studio. How does that space shape and influence the music itself and the way a piece develops? Or is it just the space the work happens to occur in?
I’ve always worked at home, which is partly a practical and financial choice, but it’s also a philosophical one: it’s a way of staying independent. It’s probably not obvious from the music I make now, but I still basically think of myself as a punk, because that’s the world I came up in musically, playing drums in noisy punk bands in Dunedin. So the ethos of DIY independence runs very deep for me.
The particular way I work, though… I can’t imagine doing it in a commercial studio at all. My process is not: 1) compose/practice, then 2) go and record. It’s more of a feedback loop where I make some sounds, react to what I’m hearing, record some more, add a new bit, leave it for a week, come back and design a new sound to fit what I’m hearing. So sound design, composing, and recording are all parts of an organic process, rather than a series of linear steps. I think it would really hamper my creative process if I had to book time in a studio and try to create something there. Also, I like to stay cosy, so I’d rather work at home where I can have snacks and nap whenever.
You’ve put out more than two dozen solo albums since the early 2000s (shout-out to Lamentations of an Ape on Foxglove. Still love that record). Does a record start the same way each time for you now, or has your process changed shape over that many releases?
My basic approach is almost always the same, in that I usually don’t start with a concept in mind, or a plan. I’ll have things that I’ve been listening to that excite and inspire me, but I just set to work and follow my intuition for the most part. Whether it’s an album or a particular song, I feel like a sculptor working freely, chipping away at the material and responding to what I discover along the way.
What’s different now is that I’m more skilled and experienced, so I can realise an idea much more quickly. The opening track on Water Music, “Home in the Mountains”, was done completely in one morning, from sound design to composition to completed recording. A couple of the other pieces were done about that fast as well. On the other hand, my health in the last 5-10 years has been getting much worse, so I can’t work as much, and I have to create music in bed.
Are there any sonic zones you haven’t explored or worked in yet that you want to try? What have you been cooking up in the studio this year?
There’s a particular kind of outsider electronic music that I love; it’s a bit hard to describe, but there’s a certain rhythmic feel in the work of artists like Francesco Cavaliere and Madalyn Merkey, where there is a high degree of repetition, but it’s created with loops that aren’t locked together. The different sounds are undulating independently; there’s space, it’s abstract but quite approachable as well. I’m kind of obsessed with this, and have tried to evoke this feel in the tracks “Crystal Farmers” and “Four Sparrows and a Bee”. I’d like to work more in this vein.
And lastly, to close as always… What are some of your favorite sounds in the world?
I actually like the sound of the motorway. I can hear it from my house, and I like the comforting wash of that sound. I grew up in really small towns, so Auckland motorways still feel kinda exciting to me, even though I’ve lived here 25 years.
What else: Chinese cymbals, bubbling mud, raw square-waves, badly spliced tape-loops. Gibbons! I live about a mile from Auckland Zoo, and when the wind is blowing in the right direction, I can hear the gibbon calls. I want to synthesize that sound.
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