"Splayed Werks" From Tyondai Braxton - Album Release and Tour Dates This Fall

The Night Temple
2 days ago
2 min read

Tyondai Braxton - composer, producer, professor - is about to release his latest album. "Splayed Works" will release on Friday, August 21st on Erased Tapes. This marks his first full-length album since 2022, and the release of his symphonic work "Telekinesis." This latest album is far different - 70+ minutes of sound design and pure electronics, with tracks under five minutes and recorded in the artist's home studio.

As a collection, "Splayed Werks" moves between dance music and minimalist electronic composition, tracing a crooked line from the IDM absurdism of Aphex Twin and Autechre to the more immersive abstractions of Mica Levi and Laurel Halo. Its rhythms are rarely content to behave like club music, even when they flirt with the dance floor. On “UnFS,” a bass synth lurches against a constantly mutating shuffle, producing something like a leftfield banger assembled from unstable parts. Braxton calls it “a Rubik’s cube of sound”: rough-hewn samples slicked with slime and buried beneath a pile of dirty leaves.

Listen to the singles:

“UnFS” “Vali” “Piiano” “Oslo”

That tension - between physicality and abstraction - is central to "Splayed Werks." The album feels attuned to a moment when electronic music increasingly refuses to distinguish between the club, the gallery, and the conservatory. Yet its experiments never feel overly academic. Braxton’s ideas arrive quickly and mutate just as quickly, giving the record the feeling of a voracious mind following its own impulses. The results can be strange, abrasive, funny, or unexpectedly propulsive, but rarely overworked. "Splayed Werks" sounds less like an argument for a new electronic vocabulary than the sound of someone gleefully dismantling the old one.