Tyondai Braxton making music now
The journey of musician Tyondai Braxton is less a straight line and more a thrilling, unpredictable drift through the sonic landscape. Since stepping away from the popular avant-rock band Battles over fifteen years ago, Braxton has dedicated himself to chasing a mercurial muse, constantly redefining the boundaries of sound with each new direction.
His path began with a remarkable melodic sensibility, evident in 2009’s Central Market. This work demonstrated an ability to translate idiosyncratic, loop-heavy compositions into a richer, more symphonic setting, collaborating with the Wordless Music Orchestra to give his music a bustling, bristling density.
But Braxton’s interests rarely stay contained. He quickly pivoted, moving into more esoteric and abstract territories. In 2015, he explored lean rhythmic abstraction with HIVE1, an installation that pushed boundaries by existing as a site-specific experience for the Guggenheim Museum. This fascination with structure and space continued into large-scale classical modernism with 2023’s Telekinesis, which featured the Metropolis Ensemble and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, layering colorful dissonances across the spectrum.
To capture this ongoing, sometimes fragmented exploration, Braxton released Splayed Werks. This collection, featuring a variety of short, intense tracks, acts as a fascinating counterpoint to his more ambitious drifts. Within Splayed Werks, listeners find a constant flux of energy—droning ambience, scuttling beats, and melted melodies that exist in perpetual motion. While these tracks resist being labeled a return to form, they offer a compelling, unpredictable view of his current kinetic artistic state.
Some of these tracks hail from different experimental eras. Tracks like the jaunty “Dia” and the rustling “Phonolydian” were released as a single, as was the sizzler “Multiplay” spanning 2022 and 2023. Yet, within this collection, a strange harmony emerges. The brooding “4 Zones” and the album closer “K Space” emerge as unreleased commissions, hinting at deeper explorations. While “4 Zones” focuses on negative space, “Multiplay” vibrates with a restless energy enhanced by sampled birdsong, showing how seemingly disparate elements can coexist.
What unites these diverse transmissions is a core instability. Messages break down, signals decay, and information rots—themes deeply rooted in everyday data dystopia and media apocalypse. In Braxton’s hands, these sounds become raw material, reconfigured into something recombinant and utterly strange.
New threads continue to emerge as Braxton navigates these waters. The music occasionally dips into the earthy realm with strains of geothermal dub found in “Oslo” and “Vali,” while tracks like “UnFs” and “NimbleFX” suggest a funhouse-mirror echo of Aphex Twin. Simultaneously, moments of gentler contemplation appear in pieces like “Realistic Water” and “Piiano.” It remains an open-ended experiment, but wherever Tyondai Braxton is headed, he is clearly armed with an endless supply of material to work with and play.
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