Moshe Fisher-Rozenberg
Moshe Fisher-Rozenberg is a Canadian musician, composer, and multi-instrumentalist. He has worked in bands such as Newfound Interest in Connecticut, DD/MM/YYYY, and Absolutely Free and has contributed to a range of music projects. He also records under the alias Memory Pearl.
Early life and career
Fisher-Rozenberg's first known band was Newfound Interest in Connecticut, a post-rock/emo group active between 1999 and 2005. The band gained a strong following for their seminal album Tell Me About the Long Dark Path Home, which gained popularity in post-rock and emo revival communities. He later became a member of Viking Club, Germans, DD/MM/YYYY, and Absolutely Free.Absolutely Free
In 2011, Fisher-Rozenberg co-founded Absolutely Free. The band's self-titled debut album was longlisted for the Polaris Music Prize and appreciated for its "sonic landscapes", "dreamy indie-pop melodies", and "groovy motorik rhythms". Other releases include the sophomore album Aftertouch, as well as EPs UFO, On the Beach, and Geneva Freeport - which features vocals from Meghan Remy of U.S. Girls.Memory Pearl
As Memory Pearl, Fisher-Rozenberg explores ambient electronica. For his debut album, Music for 7 Paintings, he traveled to art galleries throughout North America searching for paintings which he would later translate into sound. Each album track is a direct reference to a single abstract expressionist work by Joan Mitchell, Robert Ryman, Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler, Franz Kline, or Jackson Pollock. Fisher-Rozenberg's approach emphasized the use of sound as a medium for artistic expression, akin to the use of brushstrokes in visual art. In 2020, he collaborated with the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) for their AGO Home Stage series, where he performed an exclusive set featuring layers of synths, samples, and live instrumentation.His sophomore album, Cosmic Astral, reimagines a 1970s music program used by music psychotherapists in conjunction with LSD. The originally music program - which featured classical compositions by Richard Strauss, Alexander Scriabin, and Gustav Holst - was removed from therapeutic circulation for being too confrontational and Fisher-Rozenberg sought to re-compose it as something "more delicate and tender" by converting the original scores into MIDI files and manipulating them using a variety of production and compositional techniques. The album features Joseph Shabason, Alvvays guitarist Alec O'Hanley, Sam Prekop, Bram Gielen, Mas Aya and Moritz Fasbender.
The album was featured as Bandcamp's "Album of the Day" on January 17, 2025 and described as exuding "a kind of self-realized warmth". The music has further been described as "sonically pleasing, trippy, and very much a balm for your soul" and as "a soundtrack to the grand disappearance of memory dissolving into the infinite hum of the cosmos".