broken things by amelia courthouse

On her first album since ruby glass (SPINSTER, 2019), sound artist and composer amelia courthouse (aka Leah Toth) builds on her previous album’s textures, moods, and evocations of memory, adding bold new colors to construct her singular “hymnambient” music. broken things again finds courthouse constructing modernist hymns on piano, organ, and synthesizer, buttressing them with field recordings, room tone, and even the snores of her beloved dog to complete her intimate and evocative compositions.

The devotional “One Fine Morning” evokes a sleepy-eyed, pre-dawn canoe ride through a stratocumulus cloud. Like a kind of Gulf Coast Popol Vuh, the song’s melancholic stillness nonetheless portends some undefined hope in the near distance; dusk behind a daydream.

“Vihangi,” an ode to young Vihangi Patel, an 11-year-old girl who died alongside her family crossing the Canada-US border on foot in the harsh midwestern winter features courthouse’s trademark use of effects and deployment of rich reverbs to conjure the audible past, a realm containing not only gramophones, films and typewriters but the spectral, celestial whispers of departed loved ones and landscapes.

Fans of ruby glass will discover another new tool in the experimental artist’s toolbox in the form of “Keep Your Arms,” an unexpected foray into a hazy antique art pop featuring courthouse’s plaintive, unassuming vocals and a lullaby-like chorus, layered over ebow by James Toth (Wooden Wand).

A reframing of the hymn “Nearer, My God, To Thee” follows the previous album’s strategy of using the length of an album side to meditate on loss. Inspired by composer and percussionist Brian Blade's brief, hymnodic meditations, here courthouse explores questions of remembrance, loss, and the felt need to linger inside a familiar, ancestral melody in a nostalgic search for anodynes. The overlapping performances of the traditional melody come and go like the tide, simulating different camera angles and suggesting a Rashomon-like investigation of the accuracy and integrity of perspective and memory.

As inspired by uncompromising artists like Nam June Paik and Charlotte Moorman as she is sound experimentalists like Scott Tuma and the Protestant church music of her youth, courthouse’s deeply personal, idiosyncratic work continues to encompass a mosaic of influences and inspirations. It is art that suggests media as a memory bank, sound as both salve and salvation.