Perelandra is a three-part symphony for synthesizer and choir. In the first, the various voices of the orchestra slowly tune themselves to a cosmic background radiation, creating the sensation of a dawn spreading outward or a mist rising, gradually revealing the flamboyant colors of the mysterious planet. The second opens with a series of reverberating cosmic calls, superimposed in canon, creating a sense of extreme dilation of time and space. It is only in the third part that the symphony truly takes shape: sensual and visionary, the music then propagates through coil after coil of electronics and could continue forever.
Even more celestial is The Way Home, initially built around long, languid chords repeated with different timbres and punctuated by harp chimes, then around a gentle Zen melody, likewise repeated by different voices and always enveloped in that nebulous cloud of floating chords, and finally through the convergence of these two leitmotifs into a sort of single cosmic "om," growing ever more ethereal.
These are pieces inspired by the science-fiction novels of C.S. Lewis and consequently set in imaginary landscapes. The result is a series of frescoes of fantastic worlds, catalogues of futuristic scenarios, sound documentaries of cybernetic visions. Braheny applies the colors of his electronic palette with skillful and mischievous restraint. His suites always unfold under the sign of exasperating slowness, continuing for minutes and minutes to repeat the same melodic phrases with minimal variations. These are the teachings of Indian and Japanese music taken to extremes and applied to a descriptive rather than meditative field.

Following the same principles, Braheny contributes the ragas Desert Walkabout and Desert Prayer to Western Spaces (Innovative Communications, 1987), slowed down until they approach stasis and immersed in cosmic silences. Braheny here played his own wind instrument EWI.

Timothy Ferris commissioned Braheny a soundtrack for a planetarium show called "Galaxies" that was based on Ferris' own book.

Another high point of his career, Galaxies, recorded in Richard Burmer's home studio, reveals classical and jazz-rock influences.

Its leitmotif is a fanfare (almost always played by blending in a saxophone) that undergoes a slow and elegant metamorphosis, moving from the poignant opening theme (building to a crescendo amid a flurry of trills) to the refined Weather Report-style melody of the second movement (Starflight), becoming funereal and distorted in dreamlike games of reflections (Milky Way Rising), or expanding into ecstatic Zen choral waves and breaths in the style of Kitaro (Ancient Stars), or else immersing itself in slow motion, with melodic lines superimposed across different registers (Galactic Sky), before once again dissolving into evanescent, fatalistic jazz-rock themes (Lookback Time) and rising into mystical hymns brimming with nostalgia (Going Home), ultimately deliriously giving way to the festive Latin-jazz dance that closes the work (Down To Earth).

Braheny rarely resorts to dissonance, and does so only to describe the hypnotic sounds that tear through the cosmic silences (Winds, Intergalactic Space, Ice Forests Of Orion). Taken as a whole, the symphony constitutes a monumental soundtrack for a journey into the depths of the cosmos.
More descriptive than Perelandra, which was instead a cinematic work, Galaxies (Hearts Of Space, 1988) is the definitive summation of space music.

Compared with these masterpieces, Secret Rooms (Hearts Of Space, 1990), inspired by his own experiences as a spirit medium, appears a minor work: a dozen brief "songs" that, at their best, possess a dreamlike quality (Til You Get There and Visited By Spirits), while at their worst they stumble into secondhand Indian-flavored mysticism. The tender melody of Saturn Ballet and the cosmic minimalism of Magus are not enough to redeem a hastily assembled album.

His contribution to Desert Solitaire (Fortuna, 1989), an album shared with Steve Roach and others, which materializes in one of the most evocative pieces, Knowledge And Dust, likewise goes no further than an author's divertissement, an improvised performance, an extemporaneous invention.

In 1991 Braheny relocated from Los Angeles to San Francisco and then to Northern California.

That, in any case, is also the direction taken by Rain (Hearts Of Space, 1995), the album composed together with Tim Clark, but with infinitely more meticulous care. The raga of Sun Showers is led by lyrical saxophone chanting over a dense patter of tabla and bells, while Braheny scatters small electronic dissonances and brief flashes of symphonic apotheosis throughout it.
The hand is still that of a master, as Falling Like Tears demonstrates when, against a vague background of temple noises, it simulates a deeply mournful trumpet lament; but the gesture is still distracted and dispersive: now he indulges in the abstract splashes of Tidepool, somewhere between Monet and Pollock; now he intones a nostalgia-laden folk ballad such as The Hills Of Home; now he embarks on the bright, tribal jazz-rock of Monsoon; now he sinks into the subdued nocturnal swing of Rainstreet, before closing with the Broadway-style refrain of Green Umbrella.

Braheny is perhaps the most learned of the cosmic "pointillists," capable of dredging up the finale of Beethoven's Ninth, the metaphysical emphasis of Also Sprach Zarathustra, or the transcendental stasis of mantras and adapting them to the age of space sagas. Braheny approaches electronic orchestration with a Renaissance hand.

Braheny, who had caught a serious disease, did not release music for two decades. Another collaboration with Clar, Spell (a collection of soundtracks for an astronomic observatory), falls in the same cosmetic trap as Rain: Time In The Mirror is pretty, but not much more than that. The longest tracks, Palace Of Dreams and Merlin's Last Voyage, have too much narrative ballast, too little color and too little depth. Elsewhere, symphonic arrangements overshadow emotions.

Braheny mostly abandoned the music business, returning only two decades later with Liminal Space (2019).