| Tyondai Braxton/Central Market |
| Written by Ed Whatley |
| Monday, 05 October 2009 14:19 |
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INTERVIEW
SONG
 Tyondai Braxton's new record on the excellent Warp is simultaneously peaceful and an assault. The sound of waking up in a city you don't know and going for an early morning walk in the autumn air while people set up for business. Braxton is the chap from Battles with Marouane Fellaini hair and the multi-directional polyrhythmic genius bucking out of him every which way. The record is called Central Market and sounds like mid-century jazz/avant garde American orchestral music, specifically Bernstein or Gershwin to my gauche ears, but with Tyondai's skittering sound-voice breaking all through it. It's an orchestral piece, but with the music heavily imprinted with the jagging sine-wave movement and tone that made Battles so compelling and amazing. Some of the songs' strident enormity overwhelms at first, there's a lot to take in, but try getting lost in this on a long walk with the walkman on and it will make sense as a whole. Dave Longstreth whose Dirty Projectors had me bookending their set with tears a few Sunday nights ago says, “In an era when a lot of artists' idea of style seems to amount to a preference for one expired decade or another, Braxton points to something that's both tougher and more pleasurable: he makes his style out of nothing more or less than the kinds of shapes and colors he likes. I'd compare his temperament to Gershwin's - aiming to correct art and pop music by uniting them - except he's doing so from a place where there is no clear sense of what's pop or what's art, why the two are different, or why they ever got separated in the first place. The result is a singular mix of Stravinsky and Black Dice, Messiaen and Eno, Reich, Hindemith, and Reznor. But really Tyondai Braxton sounds most like himself.” Give it a go and get yourself lost in the maps in Braxton's head. VIDEO
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