Splayed Werks: Tyondai Braxton kept the seams in

Tyondai Braxton used to describe Battles as "a laboratory that masqueraded as a band." Splayed Werks sounds like the room after the band has gone home: half-labeled samples cover the desk, and one good rhythm keeps running because nobody has decided whether to stop it.

That image can make the album sound casual. It is not. Braxton worked on this material across seven years, with pieces dating from 2018 through 2025. The finished record runs more than 70 minutes and contains 15 tracks, yet more than two-thirds of them finish before the five-minute mark. It took a long time to make because Braxton kept changing the conditions around the pieces. Several were tested live, pulled apart and returned in different forms before Erased Tapes released the album on August 21, 2026.

The useful way into Splayed Werks is to ignore the promise of a single grand design. This is a record about what happens when a composer lets individual decisions stay individual.

The album starts in 2018

The oldest named piece here is "4 Zones," a 2018 commission. "K Space" dates from 2021, while "Dia" and "Phonolydian" appeared together in 2022 and "Multiplay" followed in 2023. Braxton did not hide that history or smooth everything into a fake present tense. He re-edited and remastered the earlier work, then placed it beside newer tracks whose scale is much smaller.

That produces strange joins. "Bell Smear" is a brief entrance, more smudge than overture. "Multiplay" arrives with clipped synthetic motion and bird calls. "Vali" seems to drag a thick rhythm across the floor. Later, "4 Zones" spreads out for almost nine minutes without providing the release its size appears to promise. These pieces share a maker, but they do not behave like members of a settled family.

This is a change from the clear architectural premise of HIVE1. That 2015 album grew from a performance installation in which five musicians worked at pods designed by Danish architect Uffe Surland Van Tams. The physical setup gave the music an obvious frame. On Splayed Werks, the frame is simply the decision to keep all this contrary material in one place.

The club keeps leaking in

Braxton has spent much of his post-Battles career writing for orchestras and new-music ensembles. He now teaches composition at Princeton. The biographical facts can make Splayed Werks sound like an academic returning to electronic production, but that misses how physical the record is.

"UnFS" is the obvious example. A bass figure lurches under a shuffle that keeps adjusting its balance, as if the track is trying to walk while somebody moves the pavement. Braxton called it a "Rubik's cube of sound" in the album's press material. The phrase fits the construction, though the pleasure is less cerebral than that description suggests. It is funny and heavy, close to a club track right up to the point where the parts refuse club discipline.

"Dia" has a similar problem with manners. Its bright tones and bubbling sequence imply a cleaner piece than the one Braxton gives us. Sounds keep arriving with dirt on them. "Nimble FX" is more impatient, using stop-start rhythm as an editing tool rather than a stable pulse. The record often touches dance music, but it never agrees to provide a full evening of it.

That friction connects Braxton to the history mapped in Riffiter's guide to glitch and microsound. The difference is temperament. Classic glitch records often make errors feel forensic. Braxton handles interruption like a player, pushing at a pattern in real time to see whether it will push back.

Battles is context, not the answer

It is impossible to hear Braxton's rhythmic instincts without remembering Mirrored, the 2007 Battles album on which clipped guitar and processed voice turned prog technique into something playful. It is also too easy to treat every beat on Splayed Werks as a route back to that band.

The more revealing comparison is Central Market, Braxton's 2009 orchestral record. That album already showed his preference for dense systems that can still trip or veer off course. Its large ensemble writing does not aim for concert-hall solemnity. Splayed Werks brings the same appetite back to a home studio, where Braxton can change scale in seconds and leave an idea before it starts behaving properly.

His 2026 interview with The Needle Drop makes that attitude plain. Braxton said the record began without pressure to decide what the pieces were or where they belonged. A shorter album assembled from only a few tracks felt limited, so he put most of the material together and accepted the longer runtime. That choice was not a concept imposed at the start. It was an answer discovered late.

A long record built from short decisions

Seventy-plus minutes is a difficult ask, especially for an album that withholds narrative and keeps changing its vocabulary. The length works because the tracks rarely insist on proving themselves. Braxton gets out quickly when an idea has shown enough. Then the closing "K Space" takes nearly ten minutes to test how much unease can accumulate without a conventional climax.

The sequencing does not turn the fragments into a story. It gives them neighbors. A tiny dance mechanism can sit beside abrasive percussion, and a spacious commissioned work can follow a studio miniature without either one serving as a transition. The seams remain audible. After years of playlists designed to erase context, that rough assembly feels unusually honest.

Splayed Werks does not ask Braxton to choose a job title. It is a record made by someone who no longer needs the parts of his career to agree. Rate it on the card above, then make the case in the comments: does the sprawl reveal the whole picture, or should Braxton have left half of the workshop on the floor?