Whether he’s composing for chamber orchestra or weaving small symphonies on his Fender Jazzmaster, Tyondai Braxton believes that “serious” music only depends on how seriously you take it. And although many music geeks shed tears of uncertainty when he announced his departure from perhaps one of the last “weird” bands we could all agree on, Battles, Tyondai is adamant to not only keep his “compositional voice” intact, but also to react against it. Currently, he is gearing up to present his Carnegie Hall-commissioned composition Fly by Wire at the Met on February 20th. But don’t be fooled by the lifeless artifacts that will adorn the walls of this unlikely venue. Hive, his last major piece performed at the Guggenheim last year, proved to be more than just rococo wallpaper. Instead, museum-goers were treated with a barrage of modulated synths and electro-acoustic soundscapes.
This was after he had finished a collaboration with modern classical giant Philip Glass that culminated in their joint performance at All Tomorrow’s Parties. It may also be no surprise to note that his father happens to be legendary free-jazz composer Anthony Braxton, who made his way from hustling chess tables in Washington Square Park to paving one of the most idiosyncratic voices in music history. But perhaps the fact that Tyondai is sharing the bill on the 20th with the music of Edgard Varese and Aphex Twin is most indicative of his singular vision, though it is hard to say which of these two artists he is more akin to. The Gothamist recently got a chance to speak with Tyondai about everything from media outrage to what it really means to be a New Yorker. Oh, and he also makes a good argument about why it could be relevant to have a banjo player in a black metal band. Read on if you are feeling confused.
Dance Henginbotham (Photo by Rebecca Greenfield)
What is Fly by Wire and what can we expect see or hear? Fly by Wire was birthed around a commission that I got from Carnegie Hall to write a piece for chamber orchestra, for Alarm Will Sound. I guess it came about almost a year ago and the first incarnation of the piece was performed at Carnegie in March of last year. There’s been a couple of revisions since and at this point, the Henginbotham dance troupe has choreographed a dance part to it so it’ll allow for it to be rebirthed and recontextualized which is kind of fun.
What I found interesting about your last large scale piece, HIVE, is that it sounded like you were piecing it together up to the moment that you played it. Did Fly by Wire work the same way or was the composition more streamlined?Fly by Wire was more streamlined, HIVE was a more abstract project that I was trying to get a hold of what it even was up to the moment of the premier. Something like Fly by Wire is more understandable. It’s more understandable as far as the context in which I was writing it, it was written for chamber orchestra and I understood the instrumentation and what I wanted to do with that sort of a group.
I also find it interesting that you’ve made the transition from performing solo, basically sitting on the floor surrounded by guitar pedals, to playing in a more conventional rock group with Battles, and now being commissioned by established institutions like Carnegie Hall. Do you think you have transcended playing the conventional rock n’ roll circuit? Do you think this is the medium you would like to continue writing music for? Well, I wouldn’t use the word transcended as if I was somehow “over it” in a kind of way. I would say my interest lies more in working in this fashion at this point. You know it’s funny, even when I was younger and I was using the guitar pedals to do these looping textures, in the end I always looked at my pedals as personifying members of my band in a way. I just think I shifted that understanding of the way things connect in a social aspect, whether it’s technology or people that you’re working with, and I just applied it to different models and musical structures. So in a way that has always been consistent, although I know I am on the surface going from sitting on the floor playing in small clubs and now I have these great opportunities to do these bigger pieces in bigger institutions so it’s great and really exciting. I guess what I’m saying is that they’re are not so far apart in a weird way. I have had to adapt in certain ways ‘cause different projects call for different approaches. But it’s still my guiding principles and I think my compositional voice is still there.
At the same time, do you think there are certain creative choices you made that came from the limitations of playing by yourself and having to build a composition alone from the ground up? Absolutely, I actually think that’s a great question. Well, it’s funny, I first started playing in bands in high school and that was my first epiphany moment where I thought, wow, I want to do this for real. But I think the thing that was transcendent about my first kind of musical epiphanies was the social aspect of it. It’s one thing to play by yourself but when you're playing with other people, it really informs you as an artist and it really takes the work to a higher place, larger than the sum of its parts. So when I started using looping by myself and left those bands in high school, I looked at these different pedals, again, as different people. But when it’s just you, the only process you have available when you’re using that kind of technology is the same process over and over. It’s an accumulation where you lay down one thing and then lay down another and after a while you get so used to that. Even within Battles we were using loops and building pieces in a stacked way so that was a really important perspective to have in a lot of ways. But it was also important to react against that. But I feel like a lot of the sensibility of that process still informs me today in the way that I write whether I feed into it or react against it.
What I’ve always found cool is that you are one of the few composers whose records I would recommend to many generally rock-oriented individuals. Do you have any thoughts on the state of “serious” music in the 21st century or how your music may stand in that tradition, if it does at all? I have no perspective on how I relate to it. I mean, not to sound totally oblivious, but like I mentioned earlier, I am so grateful and excited to have these opportunities and I hope to continue having these opportunities to play shows and work with these great groups. With that being said, I couldn’t tell you what so ever where I fit into any of these things, besides my own personal gratitude towards it. But here’s the weird thing. Having been part of these bands when I was younger, there’s this weird thing of acknowledging what you're doing that you take seriously. It’s almost like a swear word or an alienating thing. I don’t know, I think anybody that’s not making money doing something is serious about what they’re doing. Maybe I belong to that kind of a lineage in that respect, but, hmm, I don’t know why I find this question so hard to answer.
That’s fine, it’s not really a question that can be definitively answered. I brought this up because to me, it seems like the meaning of “serious” music in this day and age is so vague and amorphous. I think that artists like yourself are filling a certain void that is new to this generation where an individual can have their roots playing in a rock group and go on to be respected by an older, more traditional set of music listeners. At the same time, they may also have their music reviewed on a site like Pitchfork and also remain outside of a conventional rock context. Generally, do you think the line between high-brow and low-brow art is starting to vanish? I feel like there’s less of a stigma now. Everybody is so excited to be shocked and, you know what, I’ll put it like this. I’ll go on, let’s say, Huffington Post or any other media outlet and there is always somebody who is outraged. They’re saying that, but is anybody really outraged anymore? It’s a different time. I feel like in my parent’s generation there was still room for outrage, there was still room for stigmatization. I think the stigmatization and what had happened to that, there are a lot of factors that contribute to that. I think at the end of the day, I think as an artist it’s a question of are you doing this successfully? Is this a successful combination of things? Is your statement as an artist a successful statement in some way? I think that’s the thing to go by, and maybe that’s thing it always went by but it was a different time. At the end of the day, it’s like “so you used a banjo in a black metal band, that’s novel, but is it good?” And maybe it is.
And I think the idea of the “stigma” definitely ties into creating boundaries between high-brow and low-brow art, which may have been more a thing of the past. For instance, if an album like For Alto by your father [Anthony Braxton] were to come out now, it may simply be perceived as an off-beat record and, even though people may not choose to like it, I don’t think people would reject it outright. I think that kind of shock value is gone. I think the impact of something like that was very much of its time. Well, the reason that record is important, and you could argue that it wouldn’t have as big of an impact today, but the reason it was so important was because it was a step forward in that world of music. It was in dialogue with what was happening at that time. Even now, whether people are outraged or not, it’s just that thing of “I just can’t believe it.” Even when I did Central Market and we were doing stuff at the LA Philharmonic, I would get people coming up to me saying “Oh, I can’t believe it, there’s a guitar on stage and the orchestra and the guitar pedals.” And I would think, really? You can’t believe it? I mean, it’s not some break-through thing. But, I don’t know. The reason I brought up black metal is because there are so many things happening in black metal right now and if someone were to actually do that and it were actually good, it would be really interesting because it would be in dialogue with what was happening in our times right now. So that potentially novel, potentially horrible idea could actually not only be interesting but could also be relevant.
Do you think it is harder to work within a dialogue now and do you think this may be because that dialogue is more scattered? I think you’re right. The blessing and the curse of the internet, social media, and the way people release music now, in the 60s, 70s, and even 90s, and this is a classic thing, you had four or five record companies that gave people a full sense of variety because they would release the Red Hot Chili Peppers and also release a Philip Glass record. They would give you a false sense of different things and it’s the same company that cherry picked musical identities to define our times with. Now, there’s less control of that. Everyone can just put out music. It’s a bunch of smaller communities celebrating different pockets of things happening as opposed to one large community celebrating five artists. It’s just a different thing but I don’t think it’s worse. I think it’s healthier, I think it’s better, and as an artist I think you have to find a way to survive. But I think it’s possible. Overall, I think we are are in a healthier place, which is why I think we are more free to try things out because we can get our ideas heard. This interview can get deep real quick (laughs).
I think the biggest similarity that you share with your father is your ability to fuse music, as opposed to mashing them together in the way that other rock-oriented composers like Frank Zappa did. Are you conscious of this kind of fusion or is this just the way that your brain is wired to compose? When I was younger and I was getting serious about, not only playing, but also contributing to music, I started to understand the difference between the mash or novelty of taking two things and squashing them together and the difference between letting these different influences and these things that you love ruminate in you. Then they come out in more subtle ways. How it happens I can’t say necessarily.
I want to shift focus for a second and ask you, as a musician who’s spent his career in New York, how do you think this city influences you as an artist? Especially considering that you have worked your way up from playing the warehouse scene to Carnegie Hall, do you think that your relationship to the city as an artist has changed? Do I still identify as a New York artist? I would say I do. It’s always been an inspiration for me. I’ve heard people say “Oh, it doesn’t matter where you live, you would end up doing the same thing anyways.” And who knows, maybe it’s true. But I have gained a lot from living here and the energy of the city and the energy of the different communities in this city. They are all very similar, no matter how different they are. Everybody here is working really hard and working really fast, and whether it’s playing a Todd P. show or playing a commission for Carnegie Hall, everyone is excited and happy to do their thing. It’s been an amazing experience and I don’t know if you can have these kinds of experiences living in any other kind of city in the world. In the end, I do identify as a New Yorker and I have been very lucky. I love this city.
For your next record, are you going to try and recreate what you have been doing for your site-specific pieces or are you going to be doing something completely different? Well, sort of. I’m going to be taking some of the music that I wrote for HIVE and re-appropriate it in some ways. I have been working with a lot of electronic music for the past year and, it’s going to be a weird record. But it’s almost done, it’s going to be done this month and I’m looking forward to have it out.
