Tyondai Braxton - Splayed Werks Tyondai Braxton

New full-length album from Tyondai Braxton (former Battles member) 70+ minutes of pure electronics and sound design

Even at first blush, Splayed Werks, Tyondai Braxton’s new album and his first full-length release since the recording of his 2022 symphonic work Telekinesis, reveals itself as unlike anything that came before and marks the beginning of a new chapter with UK label Erased Tapes.

It may be a perfect album for 2026, a time when the sonic landscape continues to embrace increasingly radical hybrids, at once club soundsystem-ready, art-installation-leaning and music-school-mediated, but also intuitive and hand-crafted. It’s no stretch to say that Tyondai had a hand in building this world.

His career, spanning more than two decades, has seen him co-found electronic prog-punk heroes Battles, which he has described as “a laboratory that masqueraded as a band”; perform as a duo with Philip Glass; and write numerous electro-acoustic and chamber commissions for celebrated American new-music ensembles including Bang on a Can All-Stars, Alarm Will Sound, Third Coast Percussion, Brooklyn Rider and Yarn/Wire.

His “part installation, part band” HIVE project has appeared at The Guggenheim Museum, Sydney Opera House and during a three-night residency at Big Ears Festival. Braxton has also delivered 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 follows a path where dance music meets minimalist electronic composition, a throughline stretching from IDM absurdists like Aphex Twin and Autechre to contemporary experimentalists such as Mica Levi and Laurel Halo, and to a lesser degree Braxton’s comrades and occasional collaborators Kieran “Four Tet” Hebden, Jeffrey Cantu-Ledesma and Ben Vida.

It’s a world in which dirty rhythms stray far outside clubland’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 constantly deviating shuffle on UnFS may qualify as a leftfield banger.

Its composed, beatless spaces also have little to do with current ambient trends. The simultaneously aggressive and ecstatic panning miniature Realistic Water sounds like power Laraaji.