We are very excited to announce our upcoming release, amelia courthouse's dreamy ambient album ruby glass, available digitally & on limited edition cassette 11/22, and up for pre-order now.
The “hymnambient” music of Leah Toth (Wooden Wand)—alter ego amelia courthouse—was seeded decades ago, when as a teenager she became the organist in her local southern Alabama church. “I remember being a little girl and thinking about, for the first time, melody and harmony. I stood beside my grandmother, who grew up during the Depression, singing these rough, beautiful Carter Family-style harmonies on hymns like ‘Just a Closer Walk with Thee’ and ‘I Love to Tell the Story.’ Just thinking about her voice all these years later gives me the best kind of chill bumps."
These hymns left indelible impressions on Toth even as she encountered in her youth, The White Album, modal jazz, and other secular music, and later, the music of Florian Fricke, Julius Hemphill, and Herbie Hancock. She is inspired by fearless modern avant-garde trailblazers like Marisa Anderson and Matana Roberts, as well as Rennie Sparks’ playful, existential lyricism. It is these intersectional affinities that inform amelia courthouse’s melancholic waking daydream music. "ruby glass" combines vintage keyboards, decrepit upright pianos, open-tuned electric guitars, field recordings, and effects to evoke melody and movement within a mist of gauzy textures.
While Toth's academic work concerns the way modernist authors like Virginia Woolf and James Joyce wrote sound on the page, courthouse’s "ruby glass" does the reverse: it retrieves, exhumes, and privileges the audible past to establish new narratives, bringing to life the hallowed sounds of antiquity.