T O D D M A Y L E E B Y C R E A T E D A V A T A R M A L O O opposite page: Maylee Todd in her bathroom with custom wallpaper made by Jen Stark, clothes by NorBlack NorWhite. this page: Todd's animated render of her avatar, Maloo. performed in a custom outfit designed by Mangosing: thick quilted orange pants and an iridescent magenta shirt with voluminous structured shoulders, a contemporary take on the iconic butterfly-sleeved terno dress of twentieth-century Filipiniana fashion. Todd wore another Mangosing design in L.A. last September, when she performed alongside her big inflatable mouth installation at the launch of Mangosing ’s latest brand. “There’s a lot of storytelling in Maylee’s music, and it’s never what you expect,” Mangosing says. “She does dance music, she does experimental performance, and she screams, and it’s never just about the music, it’s about the entire world. “She was always the alien. My partner and I would always say that what she does is not of this world, and we just want to be on her spaceship for the ride.” for Arts & Culture out of a basement space in Toronto’s Kensington Market. “We had a sandwich board outside, and Maylee just walked in and was like, ‘Hi! I’m Filipino,’” Mangosing says. “She ended up performing at [our] first Filipino arts festival, when we started as a little barbecue in [a] little park in Kensington. She just came out of nowhere with this one-person band setup. She had a little drum kit at her foot, and she had a harmonica, and she had all of these things attached to her, and then she was singing…I was like, ‘What an alien,’” she laughs. “She was just so truly Maylee—like nobody else,” she adds. “I thought, ‘I want to be around people like that.’” Mangosing reconnected with Todd in 2022, when she was in L.A. establishing a showroom for her Filipiniana and Filipinoinspired fashion line VINTA Gallery, and they quickly became friends and like-minded collaborators. Last spring, for the closing show of “Women and Nonbinary Artists in Tech”—a five-part monthly series that Todd curated at New York’s Lincoln Center from January to May 2024, featuring women and nonbinary artists working at the intersection of music and experimental technologies—Todd Shortly after signing to L.A.’s Stones Throw Records in 2020, Todd settled in L.A. herself. She recalls feeling that the city immediately welcomed her and embraced all of the weirdest parts of her music—including a new, more introspective sound inspired by her fascination with science fiction and imagined utopias. During the COVID -19 pandemic, she found a creative home in virtual reality, drawn to VR spaces like the early versions of the online platform Decentraland and Meta’s beta project Horizon Venues, which offered spatialized audio experiences that allowed users to speak with each other in a way that paralleled real-life socializing while they isolated at home. “You can take on new identities in those spaces,” Todd explains. “Depending on what your avatar looks like and what your voice sounds like, you get different reactions from folks, but you can switch your identity and have different experiences. It was a fascinating time that inspired work that was very solo and tech-forward—a lot of ‘into your head, out of your body’ kind of stuff.” Those ideas eventually worked their way into Maloo, which was released in 2022 on Stones Throw. The album follows the perspective of Todd’s digital avatar Maloo—a Maylee lookalike, but with opaline skin and webbed ears—through an imagined virtual world that Todd dubbed “The Age of Energy.” For many of the concerts featuring music from the album, Todd performed alongside a live projection of Maloo—a kind of uncanny, singing mirror-self. In 2022, at one of the closing parties for the Decentraland Music winter 2024/25 | musıc works #150 33