Maxine Funke is a songwriter from Dunedin, she has two guinea pigs called Bob and Mr Flufflebots and she wants to be a primary school teacher.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
LP
|
|
ACOLOUR 035LP
|
A Colourful Storm presents Seance, a new set of songs by Maxine Funke. Following a productive recording period beginning with Silk (2018) and ending with Forest Photographer (2020), Seance marks a remarkable levitation of Funke's tender, softly spoken songcraft first documented on Lace (2008) and Felt (2012) into new creative heights. Folksong confessionals with the burden of memory. Ghostly confines, murmurs from the cracks. Soil, blood and skin. The beauty and mundanity of the everyday. The voice of Funke is a distinctive instrument, one which perfectly elucidates her sometimes confessional, at other times deeply inward allusions to love, loss, joy and disquiet. Lyrics grounded in observation and adventure ("Eyeballs, asphalt, grass clippings, peppercorns") unravel into uneasy truths daubed in self-consciousness and forbidden desire ("I'm not shy / There's just a sparkle in your eye and I don't feel right"). The simplest things can be the most difficult to express. Opener "Fairy Baby" and "Homage" are sensuous and probing, celebrating new beginnings while cautiously closing old chapters. "Quiet Shore", a seven-minute reverie of guitar strum and poetry, conjures spirits long forgotten and shines as Funke's first solo foray into longform songwriting. A perfect accompaniment to the album's centerpiece, "Lucky Penny", a euphoric, entrancing rush foreshadowing the delicate dreamspeak still to come. An assertive, visionary recording by one of New Zealand's most extraordinary voices, Seance is a lover's lament, a revealing of self and a secluded wander through fields of enchantment. Includes insert.
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
LP
|
|
DR 037LP
|
2021 restock. "For a decade, Maxine Funke has cut an idiosyncratic path as a singer-songwriter, all the while avoiding the parochial retreads of that worn-out label. Funke's music is intimate and deeply intelligent, buoyed by a sense of effortlessness that belies a scrupulous attention to the smallest of details. Felt appeared in 2012 in a vinyl edition of 100 on the Epic Sweep imprint. This album has an altogether more crepuscular feel, making slightly fuller use of the sonic palette -- an increase in dissonance, errant drum rumbles, and nigh-ambient instrumental murmurings around which flow Funke's basically perfect songs. The brevity, yet fullness, of the tracks and Funke's unadorned if oblique arrangements lend a sense not of sketches but of fields of color, the sensation of late fall foliage glimpsed through the window of a quickly passing train. Indeed, as much as these recordings suggest the close quarters and warmth of a small home, Maxine Funke makes music for traveling, providing accompaniment through the rough, unfeeling vectors of a disenchanted world and, as she does on the last song of Felt, imagining it differently. As the titles of these albums suggest, Funke's is a tactile art, as warm and tangible as the tape hiss bathing it, her words and music rescuing everyday moments from traps of distraction and defeat. Following limited edition vinyl reissues in 2016 -- a swansong for Nemo Bidstrup's sorely missed Time-Lag Recordings imprint -- we're happy to make Felt and Lace widely available. Maxine Funke's music, immediate and entirely unpretentious, suggests a world in which Katherine Mansfield rubs shoulders with Liz Harris, or Vashti Bunyan grows up on the Flying Nun catalog. Absolutely essential."
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
LP
|
|
DR 036LP
|
Limited 2021 restock. "For a decade, Maxine Funke has cut an idiosyncratic path as a singer-songwriter, all the while avoiding the parochial retreads of that worn-out label. Funke's music is intimate and deeply intelligent, buoyed by a sense of effortlessness that belies a scrupulous attention to the smallest of details. Lace was originally released as a CD-R in 2008 on Alastair Galbraith's Next Best Way label. Imagine the just-so arrangements of Josephine Foster and the knowing quotidian eye of Sibylle Baier meeting the realism of Funke's compatriots Turiiya or the acoustic textures of the Kiwi Animal and you're nearly there -- but in that gap lies the undeniable pull of Funke's music. Short songs for nylon string guitar, violin, piano, incidental snippets of bird song and furniture creaks, brief instrumental interludes in the vein of Funke's regular collaborator Galbraith: this is the realest of deals. The metaphysic of 'Second Hand Store' cuts to the uncompromised heart of this record, a rejection of the idea of ownership in favor of communal chance, the ragged comfort of things lived-in and passed on, a searching with no need to find, let alone possess. Indeed, as much as these recordings suggest the close quarters and warmth of a small home, Maxine Funke makes music for traveling, providing accompaniment through the rough, unfeeling vectors of a disenchanted world and, as she does on the last song of Felt, imagining it differently. As the titles of these albums suggest, Funke's is a tactile art, as warm and tangible as the tape hiss bathing it, her words and music rescuing everyday moments from traps of distraction and defeat. Following limited edition vinyl reissues in 2016 -- a swansong for Nemo Bidstrup's sorely missed Time-Lag Recordings imprint -- we're happy to make Felt and Lace widely available. Maxine Funke's music, immediate and entirely unpretentious, suggests a world in which Katherine Mansfield rubs shoulders with Liz Harris, or Vashti Bunyan grows up on the Flying Nun catalog. Absolutely essential."
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
LP
|
|
FTR 434LP
|
2021 restock. "Vinylization of the recent Home Fi cassette (originally released on the Australian Brierfirld Flood Press label) by this magnificent New Zealand singer/songwriter. We were never able to score a copy of the tape, despite the fact we released Maxine's last LP, Silk (FTR 410LP), so we figured we would perform the public service of making it generally available to the whole wide world. That's just the kind of guys we are! Recorded in stark and simple terms, Home Fi represents Ms. Funke working mostly with just acoustic guitar accompaniment. And it's a classic. Most often, I'm put in mind of the Dandelion era recordings of Britain's Bridget St. John. There's a plainspoken quality to the songs and an equally straight forward approach to the musical bits that may not be indicative of the scope of Maxine's musical art (which has lots of space for odd noises and techniques), but it sounds just gorgeous. Hard to imagine anyone who actually likes music not falling for the sound of Home Fi. But hey, there's a clown born every minute. Not you of course. But look around sometime." --Byron Coley, 2019 Edition of 400.
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
LP
|
|
FTR 410LP
|
Limited 2023 restock, gold vinyl! "Silk is the fantastic third LP by Maxine Funke, a New Zealand musician whose first recordings were with the legendary $100 Band (Funke, Alastair Galbraith, and Mike Dooley!), whose music was drifting experimental dust of a very high order. Maxine's first two solo albums, Lace (2008) and Felt (2012) (originally released as CDR on Galbraith's Next Best Way and a lathe on Epic Sweep, respectively), were reissued by Time-Lag to great acclaim in 2016, securing her place in the upper echelons of contemporary folk inventors. With the release of Silk, Ms. Funke manages to create an album that merges both of these style threads. Many of the tracks are cast in an intimate mood congruent with artists like Sibylle Baier, Barbara Manning, Myriam Gendron, Joanne Robertson, and other women who have pulled sweetly dark sounds from pockets of deep emotion, abetted largely by acoustic guitar. On a few other tracks, electronic instrumentals hearken back to her work with transceivers in the $100 Band days. The balance between these posts is delicately intoxicating. A readymade classic from start to finish, Silk travels a brilliant series of spaceways with grace and assurance. We should all be so lucky." --Byron Coley, 2018.
|
|
|
|