Tyondai Braxton

Tyondai Braxton is a music lifer who, at the edge of 50, is suggesting a new model of how it looks and sounds to be a performer and composer in the 21st century. As a kid, Braxton would often awake to records blaring from the downstairs living room. His father, the iconoclastic composer and saxophonist Anthony Braxton, would be analyzing his own records or lost in the worlds of Stockhausen or Coltrane. But Tyondai rebelled, getting into the guitar (and smashing it) and finding an outlet for his adolescent unrest through grunge and indie rock. “It fed the fire of my conviction that I had to not do what my dad did,” he once told The New York Times. He debuted in 2002 with History That Has No Effect, a chaotic guitar recording that felt like opening a chasm to the center of the earth, and soon started Battles, a supergroup that redefined the possibilities of math-rock.

During the last two decades, Braxton has composed for the Kronos Quartet, Bang on a Can, Third Coast Percussion, and Brooklyn Rider and formed a piano duo with Philip Glass; the BBC Concert Orchestra premiered Braxton’s engrossing Telekinesis in 2018. Now a father who teaches music at Princeton, Braxton returned in August 2026 with his first solo album in more than a decade, Splayed Werks. A 15-track cataract of ideas and enthusiasms, Splayed Werks pivots between the alien funk of “UnFS” and the futurist ambiance of “Vali,” between the warped vocal melodrama of “Phonolydian” and the sunken-world drone of “Piiano.” A collection of vivid exchanges between the hardware of modular synthesizers and the software of his laptop, Splayed Werks chronicles Braxton’s busy mind as it finds a fascinating tone or rhythm and sees what story it can suggest.