Festival, Todd embraced the music’s VR roots and Maloo performed her set to an entirely virtual audience.
Compared to Todd’s previous work, Maloo is sparse, honing in on layered synth loops and airier, gossamer vocals. The album is a collection of “science fiction lullabies,” she says, and it’s audible in the music, with songs that drift along pensively, more silky treble than bass. On Maloo, Todd eschews harp in favour of giving centre stage to her Yamaha Tenori-on, a now-discontinued electronic instrument designed by Japanese media artist Toshio Iwai and released in 2007. A flat, square-shaped synthesizer with a sixteen-by-sixteen grid of LED switches used to activate and deactivate sounds, the Tenori-on was originally developed as a step sequencer software for a short-lived Japanese handheld game console called the WonderSwan. Though it offers MIDI and external sample capabilities, that videogame lineage is still distinctly audible in the Tenori-on’s design and library of internal sounds—a retrofuturistic vocabulary used by Todd throughout the album, and mirrored in the mother-of-pearl-toned renderings featured in the album art and videos. But despite their futuristic underpinnings, the songs on Maloo feel surprisingly vulnerable and personal. Todd tells me that while the technologies she worked with function as sites of joy and whimsy, the songs themselves are about identity and grief.
The album’s vulnerability is what first attracted fellow Los Angeles-based Canadian musician Mocky to Todd’s musical world. “Maylee and I had played gigs together,” Mocky tells me over a phone call. “And then I finally checked out Maloo, and that was it.
“Sometimes with music that starts out as an electronic project, the song feels like an afterthought,” he continues. “But oftentimes, the best songs are the ones that can live on their own—away from the audio, away from a computer, away from even a piano. Maloo really nailed that. It connects right on a human level. It touches on some kind of truth.” He and Todd now collaborate regularly, at times meeting weekly to write music together and serve as one another’s on the cd: No Other
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sounding boards. Their current individual work-in-progress recording projects are influenced by those sessions: Todd’s vocals are sometimes featured on Mocky’s music, and co-written song segments appear in both of their projects.
Mocky says that kind of collaboration reflects the broader creative spirit of Highland Park, the neighbourhood where they both live. It’s full of small venues where rotating casts of musicians support each other’s music, and is the permanent base of the Stones Throw and its vinyl listening bar, Gold Line, which opened in 2018 and where Todd now DJs monthly. She is one of the community’s true supports, Mocky says. “She puts out loads of energy in all directions. You want to have a collaborator like that—someone who will just jump right in and catch you if you’re falling, or take a risk with you.
“She’s her own producer. She’s a great songwriter. And she’s fearless,” Mocky adds after a pause. “She’ll just jump in the deep end on anything, but create a really safe place to share your emotions. I think the more that she continues to put that in her music, the more people will start to get to know the Maylee that I know.”
After the release of Maloo, Todd bounced between the early stages of a number of projects. Between her move to the U.S. and a multi-year writer’s block, Todd became involved in curating, coding, comedy, and performance work. She nurtured an ongoing collaboration with L.A. comedian Eric André, and—with Maloo—hosted “The Virtual Womb Network,” a monthly show on the web radio platform NTS. She also began experimenting with an EEG (electroencephalogram) headband, which monitors electrical activity produced in the brain, mapping her brainwaves to audio to create ambient music.
This past year has been a turning point for that work. After an October 2022 performance of Maloo at Lincoln Center, Todd was invited to curate the series “Women and Nonbinary Artists in Tech” from January to May 2024, for which she hosted artists like femme dancehall musician Alanna Stuart, interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker A.S.M. Kobayashi, and California multi-instrumentalist and producer Salami Rose Joe Louis. In June 2024, she opened for Canadian avant-pop artist Allie
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