Tyondai Braxton collects seven years of work on the album Splayed Werks

Tyondai Braxton's new record is a collection rather than a project. Splayed Werks gathers material the American composer made between 2018 and 2025, singles, commissions and unreleased fragments alike, into a single 70-minute container.

The argument behind it is Braxton's own: that an artist's essential job is to document a creative practice and keep it, and that capturing ideas as they arrive is a meaningful contribution in a saturated moment. Splayed Werks takes him at his word.

The method shows up immediately. Opener "Bell Smear" sounds like pitch-shifted gongs pulled slowly through a mangle, and "Multiplay" sets an off-beat braindance twitch against synthesised vowels. Familiar sounds arrive recognisable, then not: a subterranean tremor, birdsong, none of it allowed to hold its shape.

The Quietus places the record closer to 2015's HIVE1 than to his most recent release, 2022's symphonic Telekinesis. Nervous electronic ticks and modular patterns stretch into ambient; club material, the shuffle of hi-hats and the resonance of kicks, gets refracted through a contemporary classical lens. His path to it runs through the math rock of Battles, Stravinsky-inspired orchestral writing and 2009's Central Market.

Despite the fragmented origins, the sequencing is deliberate. Previously commissioned but unreleased pieces such as "K Space" were edited to flow into what surrounds them, and others earn sequels: "Multiplay II" frames whole stretches of the album. "Dia" uses hard left-to-right panning, "Vali" surges like furniture music written for a brass section, and "Salt Point" opens the more celestial back half before the long-form "4 Zones" and closing "K Space."

The review's verdict is that the record works in both senses of the word: a document of seven years of scattered output, and proof that scattered output can hold together when someone shapes it. More electronic releases sit on the release calendar.