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.

Where Evan and Denise took their own music was a quick distance from where they began, recording, refining, and conceptualizing their aural-visual collage in the bedroom of a suburban family home. Individually and together, they experimented with themes, lyrics and multiple layers of instrumentation, with Nouvion’s soft, ethereal voice anchoring the frozen textures of Abeele’s compositions with frank sentimentality—a uniqure approach towards humanizing the electro-pop compositions they were creating.

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.

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