THE FINKS Release new EP The moment the world rushed in Share video for ‘I could have stayed’

The Finks play the songs of Oliver Mestitz. They are the hidden gem of Melbourne’s DIY music scene – sincere but flippant, intimate but aloof, subtle but unpolished. Today, they release The moment the world rushed in via Milk! Records / Remote Control Records. You can now listen to the six-song digital album in full and watch the video for ‘I could have stayed‘.

The Finks have released a steady stream of quietly uncompromising music via Milk! Records since 2012 – two EPs, two cassettes, three LPs and a handful of singles. Critics have described The Finks as “crushingly beautiful” and “perhaps the most underrated act in Australian music”.

With not a little luck
I’d come unstuck, I’d swim
the moment the world rushed in

Recorded in a tiny, sun-filled apartment during a pandemic, this “non-album” is an introvert’s consolation – a meticulously arranged collection of digital and analogue sounds, heartbreaking melodies and private enthusiasms. A musical beachcomber, Oliver Mestitz has turned his songwriter’s ear to building textures – synth blips and cassette loops, plucked cello and organ drones, brushed drumheads and mellotron flute, fiddly guitars and mournful clarinet – that intermingle and unravel like thoughts at the edge of dreaming. The moment the world rushed in is a lullaby for houseplants, a pebble in a pocket, the sound of a curious mind working on a whim.

Mestitz writes about the second single, ‘I could have stayed‘: “I had the first of many synth epiphanies when I heard Mikey Young’s soundtrack to the film Strange Colours. That was the impetus for the arpeggiated synth line in this song. The percussion is mostly me shaking a bag of gumnuts.”

The video for the second single enters the same blurry, dreamlike world created by the first. As Oliver explains: “In 1998, Anne Mestitz (my mum) and Brigita Ozolins were second-year art students. With an artist in residence grant, they set up an exhibition in the middle of Northgate, a shopping centre just off Main Road, Moonah. The exhibition was a grouping of person sized boxes, each with an opening at head height that encouraged passers-by to peer into a real or virtual interior.

One day during the exhibition, mum took her old Sony camcorder to Northgate and filmed shoppers tentatively looking into the boxes or pushing their trolleys past or reading the newspaper on one of the benches scattered around the plaza. The tape from that day contains over an hour of footage of shoes, legs and wheels travelling past the frame, angled towards the ground. This is three unedited minutes of that footage.”

Apart from music, Mestitz’s creative output as The Finks includes album art, t-shirt and poster design, film clips, photography, poetry booklets and zines. His fiction has been published in Meanjin and The Saturday Paper, and his poetry, drawings and collages can be found on fridges, walls and mantelpieces across the country.

You can now order a digital copy of The moment the world rushed in via the Milk! Records Bandcamp. Physical “non-album” purchase includes ‘Their lives in art’, a limited edition zine of bleakly funny vignettes about the lives of artists real and imagined, unstuck in time. Each 44-page zine has been lovingly assembled, stitched and stamped by OM, and comes with full download of the music.

Buy / Download The Finks – The moment the world rushed in: http://thefinks.lnk.to/tmtwriEP