At 33, Katherine Krohn is two years older than Matthew, four years longer in the tooth than Anna. Like her siblings, she has spent plenty of time abroad recently.
While Anna has been building her career from a base in London, likewise Matthew in the United States, Katherine has spent the past decade in Europe, concocting a musical brew that ranges from lurching jazz piano to noisy rock guitar to lilting ukulele.
Although wary of labels, Krohn describes her songs as "sarcastic pop", referring to her preference to subvert sweet melodies with sometimes barbed lyrics. Examples from her most recent release, 2008 EP Imaginary Things, include Pick and Choose and Cocaine Max; listen closely to the lyrics and you'll discover a knife sliding through the harmonic butter.
The trick, Krohn says, is to get people to listen to an upbeat tune but also pay attention to the lyrics.
"By putting something in there that's not immediately visible, I think people feel like they have discovered something. I've always been keen to avoid the whole 'baby, baby, I love you' thing. You can write a million songs like that."
Krohn has been in Dunedin a few weeks and plans to return to her home in Cologne, Germany, at the end of the month, when she will resume plans for a new recording.
There are a couple of good reasons for the visit: having got married and given birth to daughter Joanna last year, she's keen to spend time with family; and she is also performing at the Otago Festival of the Arts on Monday night at The Club, in the Dunedin Centre.
"The original intention was I was going to do it with my brother and sister on backing vocals, but Anna couldn't make the festival in the end. Matt is still going to join me."
(Matthew will conduct the opera L'Orfeo by Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) as part of the Otago Festival of the Arts; tomorrow, the first of four performances at the Mayfair Theatre will be held.)
"People have been saying for years that we should all sing together," Krohn says. "So I'm going to have my medieval, amazing brother to sing back-up. Hopefully, I can get him to do a few kazoo solos."
Having recorded two albums, 2005's Vacation and 2007's Sweet Rebellion (the latter unreleased because of technical problems), as well as her latest EP, Krohn has plenty of material from which to choose.
In addition, a range of demo versions on her website and more than a few live YouTube video clips suggest an artist who is as energetic as she is prolific. She agrees with the assessment: "When I write a new song, I have to get it out there to make space for the next one. I'm quite keen to share it.
"There will be quite a lot of new stuff, a few songs off Vacation. A lot of the stuff of the first two albums I've adapted for ukulele or piano. I'll play a few unreleased tracks as well. I think it will be a mixture of more sarcastic, jazzy numbers and some ballads."
Although Krohn plays a range of instruments, her piano technique is obvious, the result of training since she was a small child.
"I had piano lessons from when I was young, as well as a lot of church choirs. I did a lot of musical theatre and drama when I was young. Until I was 12, we lived in Woodville, near Palmerston North. I went to high school in Palmerston North, then went and studied composition at Victoria University for two years.
"After my second year I went to Nelson and fell in love with the place and ended up enrolling in a [one-year] contemporary music performance course there. I got into rock and pop music. Composition was interesting and I learnt a lot, but I knew after a few weeks that it wasn't what I wanted to do," Krohn says.
"I started writing songs on piano and guitar when I was 12. Because of the church and school music, I never thought it was a really serious option, but after doing the contemporary course, it really blossomed.
"I joined my first band in Nelson, playing early-'90s grungy light rock. I ended up going overseas and when I was travelling I did a bit of busking. As soon as I got into the routine of a job in Holland, I got my first pay cheque and went out and bought a four-track recorder, called in sick for a week and bought a bottle of whisky and recorded all the songs I had written while I was travelling."
Though Krohn will play piano, guitar and ukulele at her arts festival performance on Monday, on other occasions the choice of instrument has been limited to what is practical.
"When I was pregnant, I was playing gigs on electric guitar, but as I got bigger ... the instrument got smaller. By the time I was nine months pregnant, I could fit this tiny ukulele on top of this enormous bump. It is also easier, quieter, to practise in the other room when the baby is sleeping.
"As a musician I've found it really interesting to become a mother.
"Everyone says music for a small child is such a calming thing. For me, music has always been an egotistical thing, something I have done for myself. For that to suddenly have a function for someone else ..."
The sentence is finished for her: passing on a musical gift, perhaps?
• See her
Katbite, aka Katherine Krohn, performs at The Club, on the top floor of the Dunedin Centre, Harrow St, at 10pm on Monday. Doors open at 9.30pm.
