Maxine Funke - Timeless Town (Cassette)

Maxine Funke
Timeless Town (Cassette)
Kashual Plastik
New Zealand/Germany, 2025
Cassette

New Zealand's Maxine Funke is probably my favorite contemporary artist working in something like a singer-songwriter vein—"a girl, a guitar and a creaking wooden floor, to put it bluntly" as the NTS resident and impeccable musique distributor Pierre-Arthur Michau, better known as PAM, puts it bluntly. From 2008's Lace to 2023's River Said, no other artist has made my breath catch so reliably in the old familiar manner of something like Pink Moon. Who says you can't go home again?

At the same time, there's been a subtle but persistent thread of experimentalism running through her work, from obscurities like the cranky guitar and drum machine workout "Rearview" with Alastair Galbraith, which opens her 2022 odds-and-ends collection Pieces of Driftwood, to the extended tone poems "Quiet Shore" and "Moody Relish" stuck right in the middle of her breakout album Seance, released on A Colourful Storm in 2021.

Timeless Town finds Funke taking a surer—if no less graceful and understated—leap into the unknown, trading the acoustic guitar and creaky floor for diaphanous keyboards and synths. The songwriting is no less intimate or memorable, but it also evolves organically with the new arrangements, exploring new nooks of feeling opened up by the glassier and more ephemeral sounds of keys and pads. It's inspiring stuff—too lovely for words, honestly, so what am I going on about? Pull up a chair.