Brad Lubman — Insomniac

Brad Lubman is a conductor of new music, and has conducted works by Stockhausen, Boulez, Cage, Zorn and whole host of other composers. This is the first ever release of his own music and showcases electronic and electro-acoustic music spanning several years.

The CD opens with Garden, a sweet electronic piece that tinkles away with looped electronics and effects. There is something of a warp records influence here perhaps even a bit of Boards of Canada or Scanner. It rotates various piano, string and guitar melodies that may be distorted acoustic instrumentation or some softsynth im not sure. It’s pretty non offensive and enjoyable.

Tracks 2-5 are a suit of pieces titled Jumping To Conclusions that features a string quartet named Zangiacomo. The first piece is a sprightly number that mixes techno beats and sampling with lively melodies from the strings, it’s a pretty engaging short piece that perhaps has more novelty value due to the rather obvious use of repetitive voice samples "Because of sound waves". The second part of the suit is more of an electro-acoustic piece, and much more freeform. The strings are edgy and atonal and weave patterns around jittery electronic glitches and mutations. The third part of the suit goes back to the melodic string playing of the first with some more freeform sols thrown in. The electronic distortions are there too and the sampling, which seems to intrude on the strings more than adding to them. Voices in crowds jump out here and there but there isn’t really anything very interesting in Lubmans employment of electronics. His direction for the strings is far more competent.
Waves of distortion rise and fall around three minutes before Lubman begins to have to more fun with his sampler by using a repeating phrase at different pitches over and over, making it sound like a little boy then a irritating American etc, it is amusing that the phrase is "my art has no value". Is this ironic?
The final part of the suit is a mass of dissonant strings and crowded voice recordings, distorted into a swath of unintelligible sound.

Scary Plumbing Remix 1 is a short piece worked from recordings of an orchestra sounding a bit like there tuning up. It’s essentially loops of short riffs, melodies and bits and bobs. Again pretty standard fair with not much real art going on. Quite pretty never the less.
Pretty however is not how you could describe K.O.M.2. This is a much longer piece at over nine minutes. It is again reworked from orchestral recordings and some small bits of voice, but for the most part is a seemingly unending reworking of a single loud two bar section from a fairly aggressive orchestral piece. Behind the thrashing noise of percussion and strings is a very similar ambient-like freeze frame string section that sounds very much like the last track. But it is the constant repeating of this one loud orchestral loop and the noise that surrounds it that grates within four minutes. The remaining five minutes is more than a bit of trial. With the whole world of sound editing software available to him this is simply not good enough.

Entry Level seems to have been inspired by the Roger Doyle Entry level pieces from his Babel set in that it is a highly edited mix of a number of sound sources that fly past at such a speed that the track is given a kind of stream of consciousness feel to it. It’s no way as interesting as Doyles versions and again seems to be the result of a lack of ideas.
The final track Used Psychology is a pretty standard hard-disk edit piece that sounds a bit like old Nurse With Wound mixed with Plunderphonics. Wave after wave of random snippets of TV, Radio and sound effects batter your ears. This stuff is fun to do believe me, but it requires more than just a desire to collage to make these things worthwhile. Lubman seems to have bypassed the idea phase and gone straight for his plugins. Sadly that could be said for most of this CD.