In recent years, we've seen plenty of indie-world talents—like St. Vincent's Annie Clark, the National's Bryce Dessner, and Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood—crossing over into the realm of contemporary classical music. (Dessner and Arcade Fire instrumentalist Richard Reed Parry are even working on a collaborative piece for the New York Philharmonic, to be played late in 2015.) But how many of these hybrid-genre composer-performers have actually thrown over the alt-career entirely, in order to make notated music an essentially full-time creative pursuit?
Tyondai Braxton is the lone brave soul in that regard, going back to his triumphant solo album Central Market—a ripping and riff-heavy collaboration with the Wordless Music Orchestra, released on Warp Records in 2009 (while he was still a member of Battles). At the time, the record signaled Braxton's growing restlessness inside the math-rock and indie scenes. Since that statement of purpose, though, his discography has grown at noticeably gradual pace. He wrote a short piece for an avant-garde marching band ("Pulse March"), contributed a track to a Philip Glass remix album (and collaborated onstage with the legendary composer), while occasionally playing a variety of glitzy gigs (often involving improvisation) in and around Brooklyn.
The highest-profile of these performances was the 2013 debut, at the Guggenheim Museum, of Braxton's HIVE project: a multimedia extravaganza described in promotional materials as "part architectural installation and part ensemble performance with five musicians sitting cross-legged atop their own space-age oval pods." In more down-to-earth terms, Braxton had conceived of a percussion-meets-electronic music piece. After some positive live reviews—and additional performances in other locations—the Nonesuch label has now released a 42-minute version of the work, titled HIVE1, which was recorded over a two-year span.
I didn't catch the live iteration, and so can't speak to its success as a multimedia affair—but as a home-listening experience, HIVE1 is intriguing, fitfully exciting, and also sometimes a letdown. In combining an evident love for the percussion works of 20th-century modernist composers like Edgard Varèse with his own prodigious beat-making skills, Braxton has created an eight-movement suite that sounds not terribly different from what you'd get if you built a playlist in which Karlheinz Stockhausen's "Zyklus" bumps up against Vision Creation Newsun-era Boredoms remixes by Yamantaka Eye. Sufficiently avant, to be sure, but also a little ragged at its edges.
"Gracka" kicks things off with a promising arpeggiated digital riff, before hand-clappy syncopations join in, halfway through the three-minute running time. Later, a brief, stereo-panned chordal vista hints at some grand, possibly-orchestral designs—right before the track peters out. The eight-minute "Boids" follows, and its disconnected swirls of percussion make for HIVE1's most aimless stretch. It's not that sparse percussive music can't hold one's interest as a general rule (as the absurdist and entertaining theatrics of composer Mauricio Kagel's music demonstrates). But on my initial HIVE1 listens, I grew impatient every time, right around here. Was this surround-sound, live-at-the-Guggenheim production not going to quite translate as a two-channel headphone-trip?
