The first few seconds of Can I Sit Here sound like a star that has just lost its sheen. Armbruster’s shimmering violin loops are held together by a thread, barely maintaining their strength. As the track progresses, the electric violin gets more urgent, plunging deep into the instrument’s powerful lower register, so heavy and so distorted that it stops sounding like a violin and starts sounding more like a fuzzed-out electric guitar fit for the latest shoegaze ripper. A mighty scale slices through the din, ascending upward and piercing right into the song’s soul; the star collapsing into itself to reveal its blackened core. There is desperation and hope, darkness and one last glimmer of light. In Armbruster’s world, textures interweave and overlap, get jumbled up and fall apart again to gradually reveal the delicate emotions deep inside.
Armbruster, a Troy, New York-based artist, recorded Can I Sit Here as a meditation on the complexities of grief, filtering his anger, sadness, kindness, and every other messy emotion into the combustible textures of his electric violin. In many ways, it represents a sonic departure from his 2022 album, Masses, in which he used his loop pedal to craft gently unfolding, naturally reverberant melodies in an abandoned church. Masses felt like a warm bath and Can I Sit Here douses it in kerosene and sets it ablaze. Yet while Can I Sit Here might feel like a fire, or a star in the process of exploding, the core elements of Armbruster’s playing remain intact. Hints of his Irish fiddling influence appear underneath the distortion; his minimalistic repetitions provide the groundwork for nearly every track. But he slows it all down and amps up the volume, razing those ghosts to the ground.
The fire in Armbruster’s music comes from its emphatic, bursting-at-the-seams repetitions. He crafts songs from the ground up, laying down a foundational melody that expands with each reiteration until it can’t grow anymore, and then it hangs in the tense feeling of being full to the brim and just about to spill over. Each track unfolds slowly, beginning with soft, eerie dynamics. To grow, he increases the pressure of his bow, dragging it as if it’s sinking into molten lava to glean every drop of richness from his melodies. Simultaneously, each theme is filtered and distorted in different ways; he might pair feathery, high pitches with pummeling low notes cloaked in grainy haze. They interweave to create a sense of bottomless depth, an expansion that feels as forceful as a black hole’s gravitational pull.
Like the layers of Can I Sit Here, grief is a tangled web of feelings that come and go, thoughts that can’t seem to fade and ones that leave too easily. The album captures the conflicting feelings of loss, eventually reaching a pinnacle and finally traipsing back down into something a little lighter—the space around the pain finally has room to breathe by the time Armbruster reaches his final plucked melody. But before then, standout track “Night biking” feels like the primal scream, the pivotal moment of just letting it all out and letting it all be. The song builds on a base of a looping melody in the low register of the violin, with improvised higher pitches swirling around on top of it; at one point, those squealing tones trill so hard they nearly break, like a voice cracking from all the tears, only to later go up in flames.
But like any pain, it isn’t all sorrow. There are moments of joy, moments of stasis. In Armbruster’s music, the times of heightened, intense passion feel nearly overwhelming—and perfectly consuming—but stillness is equally moving. Take “Lament,” which feels like acceptance after the howl of “Night biking.” On this track, Armbruster draws on the sweet, cavernous phrases that could be found on Masses but weathers them; that falling-star melody from the album opener returns, just a little more aged. He savors the poignant hums, letting them fade into the gentleness of dawn. Once the album nears its end, his distortions ease, leaving just a few little plucks and a gust of wind. Catharsis is born not from the joy of living, but from knowing the pain of it, too. The best thing noise can give us is a space to let it all out—and on Can I Sit Here, we do.