Tyondai Braxton co-founded Battles, one of the strangest experimental rock bands of the last twenty years, and if you loved how weird and exploratory that band were then Splayed Werks deserves your attention. Operating in a very different world of glitch, ambient and IDM rather than anything with guitars or conventional song structures, this is abstract electronic music that operates entirely outside the bounds of pop form. Much of it is beatless and floating, and the pieces that do have beats often use them as texture rather than the focal point.

It’s clear track by track what each piece is meant to make you feel, and that’s Braxton’s real achievement here. He has a deep knowledge of how sounds conjure emotions and how melodic movement, timbre and texture of sound produce specific responses, and he deploys that understanding with precision. It’s clear when you’re meant to feel awe and when you’re meant to feel unsettled. Dia is a perfect example. It’s janky, playful and puppet-like, unnerving but not threatening, and none of that information comes from lyrics or other obvious cues, only from the textures of the sounds themselves. UnFS has a chunky kick and bass that would definitely work in a DJ set but still feels more like abstract sound work, and Oslo is suspended in the air with dubby effects that make the beat feel like it’s floating rather than driving. More than half the tracks are beatless and ambient, and even those that flirt with the dancefloor never quite commit to it. It’s music that could work in Fabric, but you’d be hard pressed to call it club music. The Warp Records IDM lineage of the nineties runs through the whole record, and you need an open mind to get the most from it, but there are a lot of people out there listening to DJs play very strange music in very dark rooms. Splayed Werks is an exciting and surprisingly approachable album from the experimental frontier.