What happens to the introvert during a lockdown? What happens when the person already prone to self-isolation is forced to burrow deeper into isolation, this time by outside forces? If you’re Oliver Mestitz of The Finks, the answer, evidently, is to make a mainly instrumental record.

Under The Finks name, the Melbourne-based Mestitz has been releasing carefully-crafted music since 2012. Recalling the melancholic wit of Belle & Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch, his songs were supreme songwriting compositions; later releases such as Rolly Nice though, his last full album from 2019, started to incorporate more instrumental pieces, nodding to a new sonic direction.

It culminates in The moment the world rushed in, a six-track EP released on September 24th via Milk!. Recorded during the tedium of last year’s lockdown, it contains five instrumentals surrounding the title track, the only track with vocals; the world rushed in and the words fell out. Mestitz turned his songwriter’s ears to new collected sounds - digital and analogue effects combined into one enveloping ambient wave. There are blinking synths and warm cassette loops; there is a mournful clarinet and a cooing cello.


There has always been a frail tenderness to the music of The Finks but these instrumentals don’t reduce the mellow beauty for the lack of words. It’s interesting to note the similar recent trajectory of Devendra Banhart, the renowned freak folk artist, who was so impacted by the solitude of the pandemic that he released the momentous collaborative ambient record Refuge last year.

The instrumentals have been embellished by a multimedia approach that has always defined The Finks’ art. Included with the EP is a 44-page zine, assembled by Mestitz himself: Their lives in art is a collection of bleakly funny vignettes about the lives of artists real and imagined, unstuck in time.

And nothing speaks to the perpetual melancholy of Mestitz’s music more than the title track’s video. In 1998, his art student mum Anne set up an exhibition in Northgate in Moonah, Tasmania: one day she took her camcorder to film the shoppers, hesitantly approaching the exhibition. The tape from that day also contained 15 minutes of wobbly and grainy footage of an elderly man sitting on a bench, frantically wringing his hands; of course this is the part that struck Mestitz the most and forms the fitting backdrop for the title track.

I had one question that I intended to ask Mestitz when we spoke but ran out of time. “When everything in music and culture feels so amplified and extroverted right now,” I wanted to say, “do you think that there will always be a small carved-out space for the quiet and thoughtful artists like yourself?” I suspect I knew his answer all along anyway; it almost feels more fitting that it went unsaid. There’s a reason The Finks feel wholly underrated in their generation but it seems to suit Mestitz, an artist for art’s sake.

TJ: Congrats on the EP, Oliver.

OM: Thanks. It’s a bit of a funny one actually. It was something that I hadn’t planned to do. There wasn’t supposed to be a release or an album. I just started recording a few songs last year and it went from there.

Was it a case of needing a creative outlet during last year’s lockdowns?

Yeah. Last March I had booked to go down to Point Lonsdale and work with Nick Huggins. I’d had this album that I had wanted to do for a couple of years - not the one I’ve just released but a capital A album!

I’d kind of given that a go myself and tried to record it with some friends and it didn’t really work so I decided finally to go to someone who knew what they were doing and have a proper band recording situation as opposed to what I usually do which is a whole bunch of me (laughs).

I had booked the studio time but obviously that was just as the pandemic started. I went back and did some things with those songs but soon realised that I wanted to wait and do it properly. So that’s where this EP came from in the meantime.

I’ve always considered you a very literary songwriter. Was it a challenge to make a largely instrumental album?

No, not at all actually. I've been making more and more instrumental music recently. My previous records had a few instrumental pieces here and there too. It was kind of freeing not to feel I had to have words in the songs to make them palatable or releasable. Sometimes it’s good to fight that urge to think that songs need words. And I was trying to teach myself a bit more about using midi instruments and digital instruments on my laptop because I’m usually so focused on using tape and basic acoustic instruments. I wanted to explore that murky world of music on a laptop.

It pushes you as an artist I suppose.

It does. I do think words are very important and I do put the work into them when I do write lyrics but I also don’t think that there’s any point in forcing it. Especially because these songs were about exploring different sounds and noises.

I was always struck by your similarity to Belle & Sebastian on your older records. With this instrumental record though, what kind of artists influenced its sound?

I really love those guys (Belle & Sebastian). I definitely listened to them a lot. I like the tone of their words: there’s something irreverent about them, the characters in the songs aren’t always necessarily nice people. There’s a lot of humour in there so I definitely took a lot from them when it used to come to writing lyrics.

With this new EP though, I was trying to teach myself to listen to music with synths or electronic instruments. That guy I was going to record with last year, Nick, makes some really great instrumental pieces. He makes a lot of his own instruments and stuff. I also listened to a lot of old Japanese ambient records. I was just trying to teach myself through learning; I guess that’s essentially how I learned to write songs in the first place. I found songs that I liked and deconstructed them myself.

I noticed that on your Bandcamp it says “Thanks be to Snowy”. I actually thought your EP sounded a lot like Snowy’s recent album.

He (Snowy) actually messaged me as well saying “why do I get thanks?” (laughs) I had recorded earlier versions of the instrumentals and had asked him to master them. We’ve both played on each other’s music quite a fair bit in the past. Then I eventually ended up changing them a little bit and paid someone else to master it so the thanks was just my way of acknowledging them anyway!

I keep stuff pretty close to my chest, it’s all just me so he was literally the only other person who’d heard these songs apart from me. I don’t send them round to lots of friends or musicians. It’s a very introverted process.

With the songs being instrumentals, how meticulously arranged were they? Did they form naturally into a sequence?

It came pretty naturally. I was actually just thinking about it this morning. It was a different process to other songs that I do because I had the freedom. With something like midi or a laptop, you can make something and then fiddle with it later. That gives you freedom as opposed to the way I usually record my stuff.

With the title track for example, as I was just doing it with a midi keyboard in the beginning, I recorded it straight to the computer, thinking I would come back to it, but then because I had all this freedom on the laptop I ended up just building it from that first foundation. There was a lot more freedom.

I actually wanted to know what made you include lyrics in the title track?

I don’t know, I don’t think I have a good answer for it! I’ve made a few albums that were a mixture of songs with words and just a few instrumental tracks so I liked the idea of doing the opposite of that. And with the title track having words, it felt nice as a centrepiece.

I read something interesting you said a few years ago - you like to think of each album as a concept but crucially not a concept album. How did you define this distinction with this EP?



In my mind this EP was quite temporal. I wanted to explore, like I said, using the laptop and midi so I guess that was a concept. These songs were made in my apartment during lockdown so I think it captures a certain time in my life. I didn’t have a job then, I lived in another house, stuff like that. And this EP was more exploratory and was about giving me the room to just make some nice noises!

I adored the music video for the title track. What made you think to even use that?

I had known that it had existed. I used old footage in a few songs on Rolly Nice before. My partner and I’s parents both had a similar camcorder growing up and used the same tapes. I was digitising some of her family’s stuff and realised that I could do the same for my mum’s. You know family tapes, they’re usually full of kids talking and shouting and playing, but my mum’s an artist so hers were really strange and experimental. She did a video in art school in the mid 90’s and her footage is very abstract. I knew she had this footage and it was locked away in my memory. I’d thought about using it but thought it might be too stalkery!

There’s this French filmmaker called Robert Bresson who was fascinated by the power of hands to convey emotions. That’s what jumped out at me in your music video.

Yeah, true. The clip just seemed right although in another context it might seem a bit weird that this lens is zoomed on this man’s hand! With the song though, I think there’s something quite vulnerable about it. For me it has so much resonance because it’s my mum operating the camera so I’m thinking about the person that she was back then, in the shopping centre filming this old guy’s hands. I know for me it has that extra added meaning.

It really does help to have an artistic parent, doesn’t it?

It does! I know nothing about film so the editing is very basic. I think that’s my dream situation, having footage like my mum’s at hand just to edit together; if I didn’t have any footage, I wouldn’t know how to go out there and get it myself. I make quite a few collages and my writing is sort of the same. I collect things and put them together.

Old camcorder footage is always very melancholic and nostalgic too, kind of like your music.

Yeah, definitely. For me, that footage in the shopping centre has extra meaning because the shopping centre is in Tasmania where I grew up. It’s childhood to me.

I wanted to ask about the zine that you made. How did the idea for it come to you initially?

Like I said I’m a collector and one of the things I like to collect are phrases. I’ve been collecting stories and anecdotes from artists and musicians for a long time. Stuff from their life about what it means to be an artist. I watch a lot of old jazz documentaries, for example. So I collected up all of this stuff and tried in various ways to edit it into something coherent. I do it in my daily life too, collecting overheard conversations, snippets of what people have said. I think I just needed to purge and get all that stuff out! I used to look at all the notes that I have and I’m like, “what am I going to do with this?”

I had a period last year with my writing - not my songwriting but fiction - where I had lost the job that I had before the pandemic so I really tried to get stories published and try to make some money from it. And these were short stories and poems, not things anyone is going to make money from. A few things got published but you don’t really get paid because nobody’s making any money.

So I went through this period of thinking of art as a money thing and I came out the other side and decided that making a zine was the complete opposite of that. I’m putting all the money into it and I think there’s something really genuine and generous about the zine. I wanted to do something completely outside of the publishing system. I’d made a few zines before as well and when I realised that this would just be a digital EP, I thought it was nice to still give people something physical with it.

Can you tell me the name of one of the artists included in the zine?

The personal stories from people in my life aren’t identified by name but the artists are actually named. A lot of them are jazz musicians because I’ve been listening to a lot of that music and I think they lead interesting lives. There’s stuff about Sun Ra, he and his band are just amazing. Mary Lou Williams is in it too, and Elizabeth Harrower who’s an author I saw talk a little while ago and she was really funny and had some stories. It’s really a strange mix and it was all very intuitive, I don’t really know why I chose the stories!

So how’s the full album going? Is it coming out next year?

My original concept was to get everyone to do everything together in one room, I’ve not done an album like that before. Then that obviously got postponed so I did the acoustic guitar, vocals, and bass myself in the meantime. Earlier this year, I went down to Point Lonsdale with the rest of the band. We had piano, clarinet, cello, and guitar. All those guys were listening to the tracks of me singing and they played along to that. Now I’ve been listening to those takes, mixing them a bit, then I’ll record drums at home.

Hopefully it’ll be done soon! I generally turn stuff around pretty quickly. Once I’m done I’m done and I want it out of my life. I hope that it’ll be the best bits of what I’ve learned about instrumentals recently but also more what I think of as traditional songwriting, lots of words and story-based stuff that I’ve done before.