Splayed Werks: Braxton's scraps make their own container

Item: Splayed Werks
Rating: 3.5
Author: JOLT Staff

Tyondai Braxton gathers seven years of commissions, singles, and fragments into one 70-minute Erased Tapes LP that keeps its seams visible.

BY JOLT Staff · SEP 2 2026 · 2 min read

Splayed Werks is a 70-minute holding pen for seven years of Tyondai Braxton, and the holding is the point. The composer and former Battles member stacks singles, commissions, and unreleased fragments made between 2018 and 2025 into 15 tracks. Erased Tapes presses it on vinyl and the LP is out now. Those pieces stay themselves. Nothing is sanded into a smooth arc.

The strongest argument is Braxton's own consistency. He is credited with composition, production, mixing, electronics, synth, sampler, guitar, piano, and painting, and the album shares HIVE1's DNA: nervous electronic ticks and modular synth patterns. The durations tell much of the story. Short works like Bell Smear at 1:54 and Realistic Water at 2:04 land like quick discharges between larger circuits, while the long tracks have room to accumulate. Oslo runs 8:36, 4 Zones runs 8:10, and closer K Space stretches to 10:23. Multiplay even returns as Multiplay II, a structural echo that chronology alone could not provide. The credits also notice a painter's eye: Matt Colton mastered, Ebru Yildiz shot the photography, and Bernd Kuchenbeiser handled design, a supporting cast that treats 15 fragments as one object worth framing.

The cost is that this container will not cohere. The pieces were never written for one LP, so each still points back to its commission or original fragment, and the sequence jumps more than it flows. Some of those jumps are the album's best feature, a reminder that these sounds had separate lives before Braxton put them next to each other. But a listener gets an archive in the full sense, with some transitions sharper than any through line. This is a record that rewards skipping more than sitting still.

So the score sits between a 4 and a 3. A 4 would require the assembled materials to dissolve into a single urgent album; they do not. A 3 would require the seven-year pile to blur into background texture; it does not. Splayed Werks is a rough, considered archive, and 3.5 is the honest number for a rough, considered archive that asks you to meet it on its own terms.