Maxine Funke’s Seance is folky, stripped down and intimate. Her warm, soft voice is like a whisper in the ear, floating among loose, arpeggiated guitar and miscellaneous outdoor sounds: a rumbling car motor, rain, squeaks, scrapes and creaks. There’s no studio sterility on this record; she might be performing a live show in your backyard.
While her sound is grounded, Funke’s imagination is far off in the stratosphere as she lyrically free-associates, telling playful stories with the logic of one finding shapes in clouds. “I’m a pony, I’m a pegasus,” she declares on “Lucky Penny,” “Pollen in my wings / And the rain is teeming / These spring nights / Have got me jingling.” On the meditative “Moody Relish,” over a beat composed of clicks, pops and hums, she chants “Eyeballs / Asphalt / Grass clippings / Peppercorns,” like a mantra, soothing and inscrutable. Funke gifts the listener with this gallery of whimsical images, each an ambiguous fragment, and lets the listener make of them what they will. And, at times, she requests assistance in putting them together: “Oh chimera / Camera obscura / Who’s going to develop my homage?”
On “Quiet Shore,” Funke puzzles over a hazy memory of abandonment, in an attempt to “develop” it: “Well he took his umbrella / And he walked out the door / And he slammed it after him / And that was the last I saw,” she recounts, adding, “So hard to ascertain / Is it all in vain?” Throughout the hypnotic seven-minute track she repeats the phrase “quiet shore,” circling back to it again and again, like a lonely island on which to consolidate her thoughts. In the background a guitar pulses relentlessly, like ocean waves on sand.
“I like to be noticed,” she sighs on the final track, “I wish to be seen.” And as the album concludes, the juxtaposition of Funke’s intimacy and detachment crystallizes:
“The forest gets thinner
And the mist disappears
And I’m stepping out
I’m stepping out
I’m not shy
Goodbye.”
The experience of listening to this album is itself a seance. Funke is the ghostly presence in your ear, transient and mysterious, haunting you just for a few moments—before taking her leave.
