After years of playing everything from pure pop as an early member of Brian Wilson’s backing band The Wondermints to Beatlesque pop/rock as a founding member of the critically acclaimed Chewy Marble and surf, spy jazz and supersonic lounge music with The Tikiyaki Orchestra, veteran SoCal composer/musician Brian Kassan started doing a deeper dive into his lifelong passion for electronic music. On ‘Units of Uncertainty’, he’s managed to synthesize these past experiences into a series of short but memorable instrumental pieces that are indescribably luscious, filled with intricacies, unique sonic elements, and fusions that shouldn’t work but do. There are some pieces that are upbeat and lively, others that are dark and gloomy, and others still that are frantic and anxiety inducing. It’s an album of stature, a true instrumental juggernaut that isn’t worth separating on a track by track basis. There’s a synchrony to this album, a chronology perhaps that necessitates each track being accounted for by its predecessor and follow up.
The frantic and pulsating percussive elements on Automata that give way to the broken and ambient dreamy soundscape of Broken Sleep is just one such example of the sheer imagination and seamlessness of Bloomfield Machine’s arrangement. ‘Units of Uncertainty’ is a magnum opus of a record. Standing at a gargantuan eighteen tracks long, it can seem like an imposing listen on first glance. However, with most pieces being under two minutes in length, it’s more of an assortment to continually taste from. There are some tracks that do stand wonderfully epic even as their own individual pieces of course. A song like ‘Race to Indifference’ is as self contained as it gets. The grandiose and expansively atmospheric tune starts from a more gloomy and melancholic place but soon builds into something far more infectious and funky with an almost undiscernible changeup that simply feels natural.
It’s a progressive instrumental project that defies traditional modes of categorisation. Undoubtedly, it is an experimental record that does base itself in an electronic foundation. However, Brian Kassan’s years of experience across genres allows him to bring out so much more to life in this epic record. Whether its the futuristic distortion and industrial air of ‘Static Man’ or the overwhelming gloom of ‘Unfavorable Semicircle’, there’s just so much to love on this deeply imaginative full length record.