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CD
On the eve of a highly rare European tour, Dunedin-based singer-songwriter Maxine Funke offers up a compact five song collection of characteristic intimacy and consistency. Funke’s creative trajectory has been one of quiet evolution and gentle revelation, extending from her initial investigations into the home-recorded lo-fi tradition into a more exploratory, impressionistic folk confessionalism. That path continues on Leitmotiv, songs that are deceptive in their apparent simplicity, the favouring of minimalist arrangements - a keyboard, some diegetic sound - allowing Funke’s voice the spotlight, and with it a unique sense of both the effortless and timeless. How can music that sounds so at ease also be so moving and unusually profound? It’s a rare skill that she continues to wield. As always, Funke remains smart enough to avoid grand declarations and sweeping statements, instead favouring the details of gestures, shared moments and passing thoughts, and it's in the care of this minutiae that, conversely, wider truths are stumbled upon. Leitmotiv, like almost all of Funke’s music, reveals that it’s the arrangements of the little things that guide us towards the bigger. These five songs aren’t answers as such, but they are understandings. These things are hard to find.
FFO: Tara Jane O’Neill, Myriam Gendron, Cindy, Karen Dalton
