Memoryhouse didn’t actually set out to be a band. It took form as a collaborative project meant to serve as an artistic outlet for composer Evan Abeele and photographer Denise Nouvion. Evan, a dedicated student of classical music and a pop-music encyclopedist, intended Memoryhouse to be a multimedia art project, pairing his instrumental compositions with Denise’s photographs and short films.
“When people think of music today, they try to compartmentalize it into different genres,” Evan observes. “I think the sound we have right now fits ‘out’ of time, but, obviously, is still ‘in’ our time. It’s something that could have happened many years ago, but it also sounds contemporary.”
Memory, then, both in terms of looking back and as embedded in contemporary culture, is the basis of the Memoryhouse project. The band’s name itself commemorates the work of German neo-classical composer/artist Max Richter, specifically his 2001 album Memoryhouse, as well as the watershed impact of that album on the Abeele-Nouvion project. As Evan explained in an interview with Pitchfork, “for me, in my musical development, there was a ‘before Memoryhouse’ and an ‘after Memoryhouse’…
Now their range of influences has expanded to include such acts as Emmylou Harris, Dusty Springfield and Fleetwood Mac. “These vocalists, Emmylou, Stevie Nicks…they have undeniable warmth to them, but also a sense of identity, or ‘character’,” says Abeele. They half-seriously refer to their new sound as “Taylor Swift with Built to Spill as her backing band.”
The new album is titled The Slideshow Effect. The title speaks to what hasn’t changed for Memoryhouse: their continuing interest in the synthesis of the aural and the visual. It refers to the photographic/cinematic technique of zooming and panning to animate still images, often used in documentary film making to give movement to archival photographs. The Slideshow Effect will be released on Sub Pop Records on February 28, 2012.
