Maxine Funke

★★★★ Seance A COLOURFUL STORM. DL/LP

New Zealand singer-songwriter makes the familiar profound and uneasy.

Songs sung in houses at night have a special other-worldly quality. First, there is the whispered delivery, so as not to wake the neighbours. Second, there is the quality of the night itself, how it allows stranger thoughts to come, images suffused with dream-logic and untrammelled by the day’s obligations. This is Maxine Funke’s world, just voice, acoustic guitar and occasional synth drone and tape whirr giving flight to songs born in moonlight, part riddle, part whispered confessional, with occasional unsettling quotes from the ghost stories of Charlotte Riddell and MR James. Parallels might be drawn with the evensongs of Sibylle Baier and Wendy Eisenberg or the spectral folk songs of Funke’s former partner Alastair Galbraith, but there exists a magic here all of Funke’s own, a style of songwriting that inhabits a unique space between a sweet serenade and ancient sorcery.