Brett Branning has always had a profound interest in avant garde music and art. As a young child, Brett was intrinsically drawn to the creation of poetry, drawings, dance, and music. The first instrument he played and studied as a child was the piano, but as he grew into his teenage years he also began to play various percussion instruments, the guitar and had a short, tumultuous affair with the viola. In additon, he currently plays the ney (a turkish wind instrument) and the duduk (an armenian wind instrument). Brett acquired two degrees from University including a degree in music composition and a degree in psychology.
As his stylistic development has progressed, Brett has nurtured an ever growing interest in the area of sound and timbre as an artform unto istelf. He has steadily incorporated beautiful, abstract electroacoustic sound scapes into the compositions that he writes. These are not just background sounds, but an integral and necessary element in the tales that his music tells. Although he has been composing since early childhood, the projects that he is most famous for nowadays did not emerge until the beginning of the 21st century.
Originally, all of his music was released under the name, The Synthetic DreamFoundation, which represented a wide range of the ecclectic musical interests Brett holds, including neo-classical music, ambient music, and avant garde music. As his body of work continued to grow and diversify, Brett decided to start stratifying his musical compositions into several different bands. Abandoned Toys was formed in 2007 to focus on his contemporary classical work and Ephemeral Mists, which focuses on downtempo ambient world fusion music. With the addition of these extra projects to satisfy his compositions in these softer styles, TSDF has continued to evolve into an aggressive orchestral-industrial sound