Splayed Werks
Tracklist
**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.
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. 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.