Trumpeter Gabriel Johnson fiddles with fracturing

“FRA_CTURED,” Gabriel Johnson (Electrofone)

When kids play with toys, the toys get broken. And when musicians play with ProTools, it’s the music that gets broken.

Or more appropriately, fractured.

That’s what happens with trumpeter Gabriel Johnson’s samples of his own instrument on “Fra_ctured” — his exploration of “fractured jazz,” a sub-genre that’s akin to free jazz taking a flight through heavy electronica.

Johnson, whose trumpet plays in Clint Eastwood’s “Invictus” and “Changeling,” alternately comes across like a teenager playing with brand-new equipment and an avant-garde musician diving into clever experimentation. How listeners respond will depend on their moods as the songs could either add stress or prompt relaxation.

“Fra_ctured’s” most “conventional” cuts are sprawling and cinematic, including the loopy opener “No Words,” in which each beat sounds like it could be the last, a “V.F.T.O.” that floats on foreboding atmosphere, and the remote “You Get What You Deserve,” an hypnotic number that could be the score for a moment of dark discovery in a mystery film.

Yet Johnson never fully settles into the pseudo-soundtrack realm, and his more innovative cuts are the ones that will determine his audience: “Be Serious” evolves out of a skittish rhythm into distracting spurts of buzzes and hums, and the syncopated beat and apparitional notes of “Charisma Machine” eventually get stuck in an aggressive/abrasive brush of electro-jazz. And for its part, “Confusion” rides an irrational, primal cadence into unnerving horn samples and incongruent static. These songs would be tough to duplicate, and perhaps that’s what makes them appealing ... to some.

Johnson is a trumpeter who marches to the beat of a different drum — a busted up one. The result is a “Fra_ctured” that’s randomly interesting and occasionally irritating and ultimately feels both unparalleled and incomplete.