FIN Cleats

FIN is the musical alias of Canadian-born, New York-based artist Fin Simonetti. Her multidisciplinary practice ropes in elements of future-facing pop music, experimental-electronic production, and visual art. For more than a decade, she has exhibited her ambitious sculpture and installation works — oriented around marble, metal, and stained glass — at galleries and museums worldwide. Cleats, her second album on Hausu Mountain, follows 2017’s Ice Pix. Building on Simonetti’s omnivorous production sensibilities while refining her presence as the idiosyncratic personality at the heart of her compositions, Cleats offers us a vision of contemporary gonzo pop shaped by her affecting vocal performances, her finely curated palette of juxtaposed electronic tones, and her deft integration of genres both inside and outside of the pop tradition.

FIN populates her self-produced music with layers of digital synth lines, bludgeoning percussion, and found sounds that cohere into a dense backdrop whose exact level of “fidelity” remains always in flux. Chiming bell tones float over synthetic orchestral strings and churning organ arpeggios, conjuring up mental images of sacred religious spaces splintered by the intrusion of digital technology. Simonetti hijacks signifiers from the art world that she occupies in one quadrant of her practice, captured in the baroque instrumentation she selects for her productions and her lyrical infusions of subject matter plucked from “Flemish Still Life” and “Pre-Raphaelite” art — mirroring her sculptural works that warp stained glass and its history as a trade practiced by Italian immigrants in Canada (including her own family) into uniquely modern forms. To put it simply, FIN sings what she knows, and builds her sonic palette around the life she has patiently sculpted for herself over years of back-breaking effort carving marble, cutting glass, and welding metal.