Kraus Supreme Commander

Class is in session: if your world is one where Supreme Commander is a shoot-em-up video game, 'electronic music' is something perpetrated by sleazy guys in tracksuits and bling, and the only noteworthy sound ever to have emerged from New Zealand is the neutered yuppie-pop of Crowded House, Auckland's wildly inventive KRAUS is sitting you down for some hardcore re-education. The latest and strangest import from Oceania's exploding scene, Supreme Commander is a mind-fucking 36-minute filmstrip of Kraus' animatronic alternate-reality, where the deep-fuzzed guitars and modular electronics have minds and souls and personalities of their own, gurgling and stuttering, screaming and warbling and melting and hissing with total unpredictability. Like the underwater exotica of Raymond Scott, or the squishy 'visual sounds' of electronic-music pioneer Norman Mclaren, Kraus' singular vision refuses to moor to any particular time or place, dripping scuzz as it lurches lysergically from alien cockpit to opium den. Some seriously skewed and utterly unclassifiable shit from the onetime drummer of N.Z. space-punks the Futurians, this is the surprise jam of late 2012. Edition of 400 copies on speckled black vinyl.