The little town Guelph in the Southwest of Ontario, which through the Hillside Festival has also boosted bands like The Broken Social Scene or Arcade Fire to greater success, is also home to the new sub-pop-baby Memoryhouse. What began five years ago as a multimedia-art-experiment and bedroom recording project, has grown to become a band in 2011 with the release of their EP »The Years«. Now, the composer Evan Abeele and photographer Denise Nouvion have taken the next step. Their debut, »The Slideshow Effect« stands – as the name suggests – in the tradition of trying to grasp the interplay of visuals and auratics. It’s a kind of cinema in one’s head, in which picture and sound are interweaved. Where normally pictures rise through the music, it’s the other way around with the duo from Canada: »We start with photos that we want to write around, to give us some kind of aesthetic grounding.« Hence, it’s not a big surprise that the album’s trailer is more of a mood-board than a musical announcement. But how does it all sound in the end? First and foremost: timeless. Memoryhouse, whose name was inspired by the composer Max Richter’s album, somehow manage to ethereally fall out of the present and, at the same time, still remain to be part of it. Nouvion’s singing perfectly accompanies the electro-pop-instrumentarium, which is refined with the help of soft guitars, violins and pianos. All of it has a very natural effect, it’s warm, it’s elaborate. One piece leads to the other, one track floats over to the next. There’s that kind of flow, a kind of continuity – topic-wise as well as musically – in which it is not hard to get completely lost. So spellbound we keep lying in our soft pillows and have memories passing us by: »Kept you here beneath my breath/Smooth the sheets upon the bed/Gathered slowly on the steps/Placed on heirloom to forget.«
Σtella
Adagio
Sub Pop