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. His immersive journey has led him over the past four years to create some of his trippiest, most progressive vibes ever as Bloomfield Machine – a one man instrumental tour de force fusing modern electronic beats with fresh melodic and richly cinematic soundscapes sculpted with handcrafted textures and tones.
The ever prolific artist’s unique compositional trademark is balancing darkness, melancholy and contemplative pieces with others that are upbeat, joyous, groovy rock and jazz lounge. Kassan introduced adventurous listeners to his colorful mix of prog rock, psychedelic and neo-psychedelic sounds, hip-hop, down tempo vibes and electronica via Bloomfield Machine’s first three albums Arguing with Success (2017), Dopamine Drift (2019) and Frequency Illusion, which was released in January 2021. He is setting the stage for the release of his next opus Units of Uncertainty with the drop of a four track EP featuring four provocatively titled representative tracks – “Cultural Treason,” “MicroAgression,” “Race to Indifference” and “Unfavorable Semicircle.”
The moody, hypnotic edgy rock/hip-hop influenced “Cultural Treason” borrows a bit from Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg’s allegorical masterwork the “Peer Gynt Suites,” representing the perfect blend of Kassan’s classical and hip hop influences. The intense, edgy guitar and industrial groove driven “MicroAgression” has a powerful sci-fi feel that caught the attention of an animator friend, who is using it as the opening and outro music for a sci fi series bout robots stuck on a ship interviewing frozen brains in a talk show format. “Race to Indifference” is an expansive, atmospheric and laid back track directly influenced by the famed Scottish electronic duo Boards of Canada; it starts off melancholic but evolves uniquely with a funky backbeat and chill flow. “Unfavorable Semicircle,” the seductive, aurally mind-bending final track on the promo EP also draws from this important influence.
“I had always liked electronic music – Eno, Gary Numan, New Order, Kraftwerk, Ultravox – and I started discovering the psychedelic side of instrumental hip hop and electronica at one point – which opened up a whole new rabbit hole for me,” says Kassan. “It started with Boards of Canada, J-Dilla, Flying Lotus, Amon Tobin, Tycho, Casino vs Japan, Caribou and others. They were inspiring to me in that they were solo creators of this more modern, but nonetheless progressive/psychedelic sounding music—but with beats. Once I found a computer program which met my needs—ease of use, ways to quickly create my own sounds with unlimited sonic software and hardware tools—Bloomfield Machine started to take shape as a new vehicle for new ideas. I could use drum loops and machines to record the one instrument I don’t really play.”
On a personal level, the MicroAggression collection expresses a lot of the chaos that Kassan has experienced over the last few years. His mother survived a lung cancer scare, he had shoulder surgery and a 14 year relationship ended. Though there are elements of sadness and melancholy coming through in his music, he insists he’s not a depressed person at all. “Actually,” he says, “I’m very optimistic about my life, but Bloomfield Machine allows me to express deeper emotions that I don’t necessarily access very often. Although I create this music for me, I really want people to discover and hear it. I think it’s somewhere in the past/present/future – which makes it original sounding to me. It allows me to simultaneously work in any time period and no time period. I believe the audience is out there…”
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