“Red and Brown Scene, 1961” Memory Pearl

Red and Brown Scene 1961 by Memory Pearl is Northern Transmissions Song of the Day. The track is now available off the artists LP 7 Paintings
Red and Brown Scene, 1961 by Memory Pearl is Northern Transmissions Song of the Day

Moshe Fisher-Rozenberg, member of experimental group Absolutely Free and collaborator of Alvvays, U.S girls and Fucked Up is set to release his solo album Music For 7 Paintings, an ambient electro exploration inspired by seven famous paintings now out December 17th via Atlin Village. The album’s latest single “Red and Brown Scene, 1961” is Inspired by Helen Frankenthaler’s 1961 oil painting ‘Red and Brown Scene. For Memory Pearl’s Music For 7 Paintings Moshe Fisher-Rozenberg traveled to art galleries throughout North America searching for paintings which would enrapture him.

Like the experience of being drawn into the worlds of those paintings, these seven tracks — each one directly referencing a single work by Joan Mitchell, Robert Ryman, Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler, Franz Kline, or Jackson Pollock — are love letters to the sympathetic vibration of one creative mind encountering another. They trace the way art inspires and generates art. Each resonates with the reconstructive energy that comes from translating the visual to the auditory.

One might expect a jagged, alienating angularity, given the modernist and postmodern source material. Instead there is warmth and depth of sentiment, accented by the analogue and digital synth pitch-shifts and cascades. The pieces crackle with the energy of translation: something new is created as the medium changes, mediated across the boundaries of genre. There are associations, asides, tangents as each work is »read« into its new format. There is no alienation, no cold distance: only engagement and warmth. The album’s lead track, ‘Natural Answer, 1976’ opens with sounds that feel like the gaze being caught and drawn into an intimate emotional connection with a work. ‘Cupola, 1958-1960’ begins with a thickly layered wash of sound as nostalgic as a train ride through the outskirts of a city at night, then expands into a cavernous memory-scene of personal association.

Fisher-Rozenberg has collaborated with (Alvvays, Fucked Up, U.S. Girls, Youth Lagoon, Man Forever) best known as the drummer and synthesist in Absolutely Free. Also clear is his visual sensibility — his instinct for how to translate the emotive context of visual art into sound, honed in collaborative work on kinetic sculptures, immersive installations and film scores. But what most comes to the fore is perhaps his recent graduate work in music therapy, and the sensitivity learned through his leading of music therapy sessions at Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. This direct encounter with music’s power to heal lends the tracks a sacred, therapeutic quality. They are suffused with curative frequencies that connect the isolated individual to a world of contemplative beauty.

Pre-order 7 Paintings by Memory Pearl HERE

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