Which superpower would you choose? It is a rich seam of playground debate: the dreamers choose flying, the bullied super-strength, the pervs invisibility. But while many kids, perhaps after reading Matilda, have stared at a mug to try and tip it over, telekinesis has never been a popular choice. The ability to move objects with your mind is too great a responsibility for too little reward. In popular culture, it always ends badly. Think Carrie, Scanners and Eleven from Stranger Things.
“It’s a Faustian bargain, an ability like that – in the end it can destroy you,” says Tyondai Braxton, a New York composer whose latest orchestral work, Telekinesis, also reflects gloomily on the phenomenon. “It wouldn’t be all power and glory.”
A titanic composition for 87 musicians, Telekenisis took two years to write; it gets its debut at the renovated Queen Elizabeth Hall in London next week. So what does Telekinesis sound like? “There’s a lot of awe and beauty and frustration in this piece – it sounds like a tug of war,” Braxton says over coffee near his studio in Brooklyn. “It can be exciting, confusing, can envelop you, terrify you. It’s intense. It’s not polite.”
That intensity hasn’t dipped throughout Braxton’s career, first in art-rock band Battles and then as a solo composer. His major works are Central Market (2009), a bug-eyed orchestral suite, and Hive (2013), an abstruse yet rhythmic electronic work. Telekinesis marries these approaches in his longest and biggest piece yet. “This is a culmination of a lot of avenues I’ve been going down compositionally,” he says. “It’s a pretty symbolic turning point in my life. At the beginning of writing this piece, my wife and I realised we were having a baby, so I had nine months of being able to focus. I also turn 40 this year, and my 40s are going to suit me great, because I’m a total goof-dad guy. So many games, inside jokes, goofy voices. You don’t have to live in darkness to do something dark – as David Lynch says, you don’t have to die to do a death scene.”
Braxton grew up surrounded by music. His father is reed player Anthony Braxton, one of the most adventurous American composers of the 20th century, who emancipated jazz from its standard rhythmic modes. They share the same hairstyle, a modest salt-and-pepper afro. Braxton junior started on violin and clarinet aged three (“I was an absolute virtuoso”, he deadpans). Then the teenage years arrived. “My dad was an opposing force, in terms of how I wanted to define myself,” he says, aping a door-slamming tantrum: “I was really into Nirvana, and Kurt Cobain would smash his instruments. My dad was like, you shouldn’t smash your guitar, that’s your baby. So I was like, I’m smashing it! But I didn’t have any money, so I would have to get it repaired. I had to rebel economically.”
Braxton then studied at the Hartt School of Music, in Connecticut. He describes it as a “complicated, amazing time”, when practical skills like solfège – “being able to identify pitch and intervals, even a fridge buzzing in the background” – chafed against teaching that he says took years to unlearn, particularly a starchy, over-analytical take on experimental composers. “Stravinsky, Xenakis, Varèse – they’re just dudes, struggling with their own intuition,” he says. “Particularly Varèse – he was a motherfucker. This guy was in his apartment, depressed as he couldn’t get the sounds he wanted, because the machines weren’t invented yet. He was hard – not some sweet, academic dude. I could relate to that.”
He took his chops and his attitude and turned it to Battles, a four-piece band who synthesised tricky elements – awkward time signatures, warped vocals – into groove and pop. Their 2008 album Mirrored, underpinned by the sensational glam-rock anthem Atlas, earned them high-profile festival slots and long tours, but Braxton quit during the sessions for the follow-up. Was it the punishing road schedule? “The touring was the smoke – the fires were in other places in the band.” His mouth opens and closes like a fish on land. “I’ll just say it was complicated, and I saved myself by getting out of an untenable situation. It was a bad breakup, but it was the right thing to do. I was married to three people I just wanted to make music with, and personality-wise, these are people I ordinarily would have a hard time interacting with, on a person-to-person level. And suddenly I’m on tour with them for 17 and a half months.”
He compares it to his actual marriage, to visual artist Grace Villamil, with whom he collaborated on the visuals for Telekinesis. “We have the luxury of being honest with each other and it not being a big deal. We don’t always agree, but the base is love and excitement.” Was Battles creatively stifling? “It’s hard to get deeper into yourself artistically when you have three other guys around. With what I’m doing now, it’s richer, it’s harder. But Battles was also a beautiful time, a rich, rewarding time.”
From his time with the band, Braxton carries along a strong work ethic, an understanding of how the industry works (“how the donuts are made”), plus their irreverent, playful energy. The challenge he now faces is to square these things with the world of composition. “Is it punk rock to orchestrate? Where does technique and knowledge fit in with liberation from constraints of law? How do you fuse that immediacy and urgency with what I’m doing? I still want that energy, that power.”
When he performed Central Market with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, he faced the stuff of Hollywood cliche: the snooty aesthetes who are won over by the plucky punk kid. “Some of the instrumentalists looked at the score and went: ‘Ha!’” Braxton gives a haughty, mane-tossing laugh. “But the show was great, and they came up to me after and said” – he looks down his nose – “’That was pretty good.’” As well as developing Hive and Telekinesis, he has since performed Philip Glass’s Études with the man himself – “a sweet, deep guy, with such a great sense of humour” – and worked with Kronos Quartet.
How does his dad view Braxton’s passage, joining him at the vanguard of American experimental music? Another fish impression. “Full disclosure – him and I do not have a relationship at all. I saw him once a decade ago.” Why did their relationship erode? “Family” is all he will reply, though he has no animosity towards his father. (Braxton’s parents are divorced, and he has a good relationship with his mother.)
Telekinesis emerged from the idea of doing an opera version of Akira, a Japanese manga about a telekinetic member of a biker gang. But it was a little on the nose for Braxton, who doesn’t like his music to tell you what to think: “Minor chords are sad, major chords are happy – I’m not playing with those tropes.”
What do these subjective, sensory pieces mean, then, in an age of vociferous political anger? “In the social collapse happening in a lot of the world, and the comically macabre, surreal elements in politics, the frustration and intensity in Telekinesis might be applicable,” he concedes. “But my work is very consciously separate from what’s happening at any given time. I appreciate artists working in identity politics, but the power in my work is in allowing people to see what they want to see, instead of taking something that has the potential to be transcendent and narrowing its interpretation by angling it towards something.”
Braxton has now reached “a plateau” after the struggle of producing Telekinesis. “It was so psychically draining. These are the biggest forces I’ve ever used,” he says. “To be so unfettered, psychically, it was like having actual telekenisis – like walking around with buildings exploding. And then there was me against myself, which is brutal. I’m pure evil to myself in the studio; I’m at war with myself. And the piece sounds like this.”
Out the other side, he’s planning to move his young family upstate, and work on electronic music using the lessons he’s learned. “I’m having a moment like Neo had in the Matrix, where you see the code in everything and see how it fits together – a unification of the composition process.” He may not yet be able to move objects with his mind, but Braxton’s powers are still building.
• The world premiere of Telekinesis is at Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, on 18 April.
