At Home With Tyondai Braxton

October 01, 2009

In the past, watching Tyondai Braxton play, either with his loop-based solo music or as a member of Battles, has been like watching button-downed scientists with voices like Wookies discover Legos and build spaceships. There are so many moving parts, new inventions, wires, keys and lots and lots of hair. But for his new piece, Central Market, Braxton went inward, composing something that sits amidst many plains—rock and electronic, certainly, but is most heavily a forward-thinking piece of modern composition. We went to Braxton's very tidy (and surprisingly mostly knickknack-free) Brooklyn apartment to talk to him about the process of writing classical music, his hopes for Central Market and how he thinks of himself as a musician. Turns out, not surprisingly, he thinks a whole lot of things.

At Home With Tyondai Braxton