An artist statement is a nice way to foster anticipation. According to the Junkestra tear sheet, composer Nathaniel Stookey burrowed through the San Francisco city dump to collect a palette of trash percussion, from bottles to pipes to shopping carts to birdcages to sinks. Armed with these, seven performers from the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra and legendary saw player David Weiss, Stookey forged a three-movement piece of music that garnered standing ovations and sold-out performances; "Play the whole piece again", the thousand-seat audience cried out for the encore.

That leads to the point: from the myriad possibilities and combinations to be explored with this wonderful potentiality, this grandiose idea yields a ten-minute, formally predictable piece of music (the disc includes an equally calculable "Junkestra Dance Mix").

Stookey's work fails to inspire for several reasons. To a steady pulse, he stingily lays out even measures of bells, metallic snaps, deep thumps and vibrating plastic tubes (think the trademark Blue Man Group sound). It's a promise of fascination that peters within thirty seconds, though: chunks of "here's this sound, now here's that sound", an avoidance of dynamic bursts, overflowing counterpoint, complex simultaneities and interjections � all idiosyncratic gestures one would expect from a pile of rotting, creaky trash � and an insistence for harmonic domestication do little more than half-heartedly plagiarize John Cage's 70-year old Constructions. (The glass bottles worn on fingers, clanking together at the beginning of Movement III, piqued my interest but only because it rips off that creepy scene in The Warriors where Luther calls the gang to "come out to play!")

It's not a problem of placidity, as Gagaku's limited range and the steady ostinatos of Gamelan � done right � are emotionally gripping. Junkestra seems like a half-planned gambit, wasting the "daunting task of transporting a stageful (sic) of garbage". In ten years, perhaps Stookey will see a discarded Mazda muffler, slap his forehead, yelp out a "eureka!" and revisit this missed opportunity.