Splayed Werks

Even at first blush, Splayed Werks, Tyondai Braxton’s new album, his first full-length release since the recording of his 2022 symphonic work, Telekinesis, reveals itself as unlike what came before and marks the beginning of a new chapter with UK label Erased Tapes. First off, there’s a lot more music here, 70+ minutes of pure electronics and sound design. Plus, it’s divided in a way that’s out-of-step with the longer forms the 47 year-old composer/producer has previously imagined into being. Of the album’s 15 tracks, more than two-thirds are sub-five minutes.
 
It may be a perfect album for 2026, a time when the sonic landscape continues to fervently embrace increasingly radical hybrids, at once club soundsystem-ready, art-installation-leaning, and music-school-mediated. But also, importantly, intuitive and hand-crafted. It’s no stretch to say that Tyondai had a hand in building this world. His two decades-plus-long career has seen him co-found electronic prog-punk heroes Battles (which he’s described as “a laboratory that masqueraded as a band”); performing as a duo with Philip Glass; write numerous electro-acoustic and chamber commissions for celebrated American new-music ensembles such as Bang on a Can All-Stars, Alarm Will Sound, Third Coast Percussion, Brooklyn Rider, and Yarn/Wire; having his “part installation, part band” HIVE project appear at The Guggenheim Museum, Sydney Opera House, and a 3-night residency at Big Ears Festival; and deliver a series of technologically ambitious, at times orchestral works for lauded labels of electronic, experimental and future-music, Warp and Nonesuch Records.
 
As a portfolio, Splayed Werks hews to the menu of a dance music meets minimalist electronic composition, a throughline that stretches from IDM absurdists like Aphex Twin and Autechre, to contemporary immersives like Mica Levi and Laurel Halo. (And, to a lesser degree, to Braxton’s comrades and occasional collaborators, Kieran “Four Tet” Hebden, Jeffrey Cantu-Ledesma and Ben Vida.) It’s a world in which the multitude of dirty rhythms strays far outside club-land’s big rooms—though one can imagine expert mixing hands and a world-class soundsystem transforming the dubwise lo-fi linearity of “Oslo” into a psychedelic wonder, while the interplay between the bass-synth and the constantly deviating shuffle on “UnFS” may qualify as a leftfield banger. And its composed beatless spaces have little to do with current ambient proclivities—the at-once aggressive and ecstatic, panning miniature, “Realistic Water” sounds like power Laraaji.