Emile Mosseri

A onetime member of New York indie pop/rock group the Dig, Emile Mosseri composes thoughtful art rock and eclectic film and television scores, all with human experience as the focus. Incorporating dramatic orchestral music, poignant keyboard compositions, and/or whimsical small-ensemble pieces, depending on the project or scene, some of his early screen credits included The Last Black Man in San Francisco (2019) and the Amazon thriller series Homecoming (2020). His music for the 2020 film Minari resulted in an Oscar nomination for Best Original Score. Mosseri teamed up with singer/composer Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith to record the experimental project I Could Be Your Dog/I Could Be Your Moon. His first solo album, Heaven Hunters, arrived in 2023. A year later, the album Hardy Boys was a genre-blurring experimental collaboration with avant-garde artist Sam Gendel. Recorded with a three-piece backing band, his second solo pop outing, tryin to be born, arrived in 2025.Growing up in New York City, Mosseri and friend David Baldwin started making music together as preteens. During their high school years, they had rehearsal space next door to the Strokes. Mosseri went on to study film scoring at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, then later reunited with Baldwin to form the indie rock band the Dig. As co-frontmen, Mosseri and Baldwin led the Dig through a series of eclectic albums and EPs during the early half of the 2010s, merging bright synth pop with jangling guitars, psychedelia, and hazy indie pop. In 2016, Mosseri composed his first feature-length film score for the indie comedy How to Tell You're a Douchebag. Meanwhile, the Dig continued to tour and record, releasing the 2017 album Bloodshot Tokyo and a pair of 2018 EPs, Moonlight Baby and Afternoon with Caroline. Mosseri's profile as a composer rose with the critical success of the 2019 film The Last Black Man in San Francisco. The following year, he composed the score for Miranda July's film Kajillionaire, as well as the second season of the Amazon series Homecoming. By this point, the Dig had re-formed under the name Human Love and released the 2020 EP Black Void. In early 2021, Mosseri gained even wider recognition as a composer when his score for the acclaimed film Minari was nominated for an Academy Award. During this period, he also began working on new music with composer Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, a collaboration that resulted in the ethereal I Could Be Your Dog, released by Ghostly International, that September. The duo then issued a companion release, I Could Be Your Moon, a further exploration of electronic ambience and vocals that, when paired with its predecessor, created a full-length album. Heaven Hunters, Mosseri's debut effort as a solo artist, was produced by Bobby Krlic (the Haxan Cloak) and released by Mosseri's own Greedy Heart Records in June of 2023. It merged meditative indie rock, orchestral elements, and indie electronica into the song format. That year also saw the release the soundtrack to 2022's When You Finish Saving the World, which consisted of songs by Ziggy Katz and instrumental indie tracks by Mosseri. Mosseri took a more experimental turn on 2024's Hardy Boys, a collaborative album with avant-garde musician Sam Gendel that drew from electronic, jazz, chamber music, and pop tradition. Working again with Krlic, Mosseri assembled a backing band consisting of guitarist Meg Duffy (Hand Habits), bassist Dougie Stu (Brijean, Bells Atlas), and drummer Kosta Galanopoulos (Magic Giant, Luke Temple) at Altamira Sound in Alhambra, California to record his second solo album. The resulting tryin to be born arrived on Greedy Heart in February 2025.
© Marcy Donelson /TiVo