Formats
ERATP184LP - 2xLPs
3700551787005ERATP184CD - CD
3700551786992
Details
**ON BLACK BIO DOUBLE VINYL** Even at first blush, Splayed Wrks, 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.
Tracks
1. Bell Smear 2. Multiplay 3. Dia 4. Vali 5. UnFS 6. Salt Point 7. Oslo 8. Realistic Water 9. Multiplay II 10. Phonolydian 11. Piiano 12. 4 Zones 13. Nimble FX 14. Clouds Of 15. K Space