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.
