Armbruster is the recording project of Troy-based composer, performance artist and violin player Connor Armbruster, a vehicle for his diverse and exploratory music which probes for new possibilities within the experimental style. After entering college to study for a career in the sciences, Armbruster came to realise his interests were more firmly rooted in music. He decided to take a leave of absence, before transferring to a smaller department in the school that explored the convergence of art and science, where he became intensely interested in the avant garde tradition developed by the likes of Pauline Oliveros.
The latest Armbruster release, an album titled Masses out via Dear Life Records later this month, is essentially a conversation between sound and setting. With nothing beyond a pair of violins, one acoustic and one electric, Armbruster performed tracks both composed and improvised within the refuge of an old church. The two instruments conjure and interrogate the contradictory ambiences of such a place, peeling back layers to examine the coexistence of sanctuary and space. An environment capable of protection and nurturement despite its own slow deterioration.
Masses offers this duality not so much as a question but the basis of its conversation. An exchange spilt into two parts. Firstly with ideas of loss and ruin, the slow fading of the space from solemn significance to solemn silence, and then the counter movement. A springing back through curiosity and exploration, as captured in a brighter, fonder sound.
We’re delighted to share the album’s latest single ‘The House Stood Empty’, a track very much situated within the first part of this exchange. The composition opens with sluggish pulsing, the torpid heartbeat of some great thing now dying or dormant. But within this ebb and flow exists a certain weight, some latent physicality which evokes what it once must have been, or what it might be again. Call it a memory, call it a ghost, a force Armbruster is mourning as the track unfolds, or perhaps calling back to the present once more.
