amelia courthouse’s Leah Toth follows up 2019’s spectral Ruby Glass with four lingering meditations on sound and life and mortality. “No one ever really dies,” she intones in “Keep Your Arms,” amid translucent drones and flickering auras and some fine, elusive e-bow from husband James Jackson Toth, but, of course, that’s not true. Toth herself has sustained heavy losses in recent years, a father and a beloved dog and maybe others. Her art is a form of spiritualism, seeking solace in old Baptist hymns and hovering overtones.
It's fair to lead with “Keep Your Arms,” the lone track with vocals and the one with the most defined and accessible melody. Like the others, it teeters on the edge of dissolution, but the ghost of a tune, even a melody shimmers even as it turns to pure tone. Yet it’s when you get past the single—and admittedly single doesn’t seem like the right descriptor—that the album’s quiet splendor reveals itself.
“One Fine Morning” sheathes it questioning piano riff in deep echo and fuzz, making the simple motif stand in for all the piano tunes heard through open windows and in other rooms, all through long elapsed childhood and early life. A scratchy, barely audible hissing runs on its own parallel track, filling in the empty spaces in Toth’s reverberating sonic chamber. The piece goes on for eight minutes, picking up sympathetic vibrations from other instruments but otherwise not changing much. It’s a still, serene space with its own bright, repeating architecture, but you experience it from a slight remove, a nostalgia.
“Vihangi” incorporates found sounds, like the rasping breath of Toth’s dog, into haunted electronic textures: an electric piano and some sort of friction-y buzz that rises and falls. The song commemorates Vihangi Patel, an immigrant child of 11, who with her entire family froze to death while attempting to cross into Canada in winter. Toth doesn’t use any obvious sonic signifiers — no sounds of weather or struggle — but the song has a kind of heartbroken grace.
So, too, does “Nearer My God, To Thee,” with starts with the whirr of an old-fashioned film projector and proceeds through clanks and whispers and echoes to the church organ recital of the title’s hymn. If you’ve spent any time in rural churches, that melody will always carry the whiff of death; it’s a mainstay of Baptist funerals. It courses through a post-modern sound sculpture of knocks and clinks and twitching sounds, carrying the flotsam of modern life in its strong and steady current. And yes, Leah Toth and her amelia courthouse are adept at electronic experiment and deconstruction and sound-as-sound, but firmest ground lies in the past, in memory and ritual and engrained culture.
Amelia Courthouse is the “hymnambient” alter ego of Leah Toth, filtering childhood memories of southern protestant hymns through the experiment lens of Toth’s adult musical world. The first album, Ruby Glass, layers soft, evocative textures of sound over spectral shreds of melody. In her Dusted review, Jennifer Kelly observed that, “There is a stillness in it that seeps into you, bringing calm, clarity and a faint longing for the past.”
Alice Coltrane—World Spirituality Classics 1: The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda
I regularly reach for Coltrane’s albums, but this compilation has become a mainstay for me. Meditative, deeply spiritual, and melodic, it is a balm for troubled times.
Graham Lambkin—Amateur Doubles
Put simply, Amateur Doubles is a recording of recordings plus ambient room sounds: Lambkin and his family took a road trip, and he recorded the sounds inside the car, which include music by Besombes-Rizet and Philippe Grancher, children and adults talking, car doors slamming, and tires on interstate asphalt. It’s simple, really, but profound in what it says about what music can be.
Billie Whitelaw’s performance in Samuel Beckett’s play Rockaby
It’s no secret among drama aficionados that Billie Whitelaw is the greatest performer of Samuel Beckett’s late dramatic work. But I am especially struck by her performance as W in Alan Schneider’s production of Rockaby, which we are fortunate to have recorded on film. As she noiselessly rocks, she fully displays the subtle complexities of that character: childlike, helpless, haggard, desperate for human contact. It is a hauntingly beautiful performance of a woman running out the clock.
Julius Hemphill—“Hard Blues” from ‘Coon Bid’ness
I have heard more praise for Dogon A.D., but the 20-minute sidelong jam on the B-side of ‘Coon Bid’ness(which is from the same recording session) is my favorite Hemphill recording and one of my favorite jazz recordings from any time period. It’s got free jazz sensibilities with a satisfyingly off-kilter head that looks forward to Ornette Coleman’s playfully demented, carnivalesque Dancing in Your Head.
David New’s short film / R. Murray Schafer biography Listen
In many ways, musicologist R. Murray Schafer picks up where John Cage left off but with an ecological bent. In Listen, Schafer invites us to turn off human-made noise and indulge in the living soundscapes of the natural world.
The lock groove ending side A of Lindsey Buckingham’s Go Insane
Within the current state of the failed music industry, where dull sure bets are almost always signed over more interesting risk takers, I worry we’ll never again have mad scientist artists who also appeal to millennials cooing over the halcyon days of pre-Rumours Lindsey and Stevie. Buckingham’s genius is well documented, but I’m not so sure that his strangeness is, though it is apparent from the coffee plant demo days through Fleetwood Mac and his most recent solo records. One example is the non-western-sounding lock groove ending side A of Go Insane. It’s mesmerizing, coming as it does at the end of an infectious pop tune.
The Kinks—Arthur
I’m increasingly of the opinion that Arthur is the best of the Kinks; I’m 100% convinced that it’s my favorite. Every song on the record is a showstopper: from the march-like snare on “Yes Sir, No Sir” to the tender and devastating “Some Mother’s Son” and the ultimate extended jam that is “Australia,” there’s something for everyone. A perfect album.
Ernest Hood—Neighborhoods
For years now, this private press ambient album featuring field recordings, synth, and zither has been the most prized LP in my vinyl collection. I love it so, I make sure to listen to it once a year, uninterrupted. I am thrilled that Freedom to Spend reissued it recently so that my original copy can remain safely stowed.
Andrei Tarkovsky—The Mirror
The cavewater field recording on my piece “murphie 1” is directly inspired by the scene in The Mirror where Margarita Terekhova is shown pulling her wet hair out of a tub of water. It is such a visually stunning and unsettling scene, and I have imagined scoring it, myself.
Glenn Kotche—Introducing Glenn Kotche
Second only to the Beatles’ “Revolution 9,” this is one of the first pieces of so-called experimental music I ever heard. I was particularly struck by the percussive and melodic 22-minute “Stagger On,” which became a gateway—backwards, I know—to Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and Phillip Glass, among so many others. Kotche’s solo work represented a turning point for me as a deep listener.
Leah Toth’s Amelia Courthouse shrouds very simple melodies in echo and atmospheric hum, allowing the surrounding sounds to wash over and erode these bits of tune in a way that suggests time, distance and memory. The five pieces on this album vary in degrees of abstraction and figurative-ness, but even the most song-like of them, “Becker,” which weaves in threads of “I Am a Poor Wayfaring Stranger,” feels less like a song and more like a visitation from the ghost of a song. And yet, they are so beautiful, these tremulous meditations on tone and decay. They ripple out like water (there is recorded water in a couple of them), finding a calm, ruminative space between motion and stillness.
Leah Toth is an academic, currently teaching modern literature with a sound studies focus at St. Norbert College in Wisconsin. She is married to James Toth of Wooden Wand though her work and his are vastly different. His is grounded firmly in folk and blues (though nudged towards psychedelic experiment), while hers is ambient, floating, concerned with spectral atmospherics. She has a lot in common with the late Letha Rodman Melchior, whose last album Mare Australe explored the same droning, field-recording-infused spiritual territories. In this album, she says she was reflecting on her youth as an organ player in a rural Alabama church and her relationship with her grandmother, who would come over to her house and sing old hymns while she played. You won’t hear much direct reference to traditional religious music in these pieces, outside of “Becker,” which, as noted earlier, contains fragments of an old spiritual, but there is the same sense of reverent, prayerful meditation that you might feel in a church, early on, with the organ playing, before the service starts. There is also a good bit of the fog of memory in these tunes, as if Toth is reaching for notes and tones that she’s half forgotten. The echo around the piano, in particular, has a nostalgic, melancholy air.
These songs vibrate to unheard frequencies. “No Chimbo,” for instance, wavers and trembles like a long flute note, subtle variations in tone percolating under its tranquil vibe. “Ruby Glass,” proposes pairs of piano notes, spaced octave apart and given time and liberty to decay, then covers them over with bells. It is like viewing a still room through a bead curtain, as you hear the piano through jangle, and then, towards the end, the piano drops out altogether and all you hear is bells. You’re left to wonder whether the main point of the song was the piano, as you thought at first, or the way it disappeared behind other sounds.
The highlight, though, comes at the end in the nearly 18-minute long “Murphie 1.” This is the gentlest of tracks, moving slowly from one strum to another, while some water runs in the background. It lulls you into an assumption that nothing will change, from one end of the cut to the other. And yet it does shift shape slowly, with a harmonium swelling, some wordless voices wafting in and finally, towards the end, some staticky voices talking, though you can’t make out what they’re saying. You spend a long while in this mysterious space, but it feels more like you’re outside of time than moving through it. There is a stillness in it that seeps into you, bringing calm, clarity and a faint longing for the past.
