Maylee Todd (foreground) performing at the launch of a new clothing line by Regalo Studios in a warehouse in downtown Los Angeles, September 2024.
X on her North American tour. When we spoke last fall, she had begun work on a new album, through which she intends to dig into new parts of her inner psyche and practice.
While most of her previous music has been concept-driven, now Todd is focusing on doing as much intuitive, freeform writing as possible, without trying to use any conceptual theme to justify it. “With this process, I’m the most sober I’ve ever been,” she says. “I’m sitting with a lot of stuff, a lot of solitude, and a lot of processing. There’s a lot of discomfort there.”
For her upcoming record, she’s working with harder sounds—industrial drum samples and heavier bass lines—and producing songs that feature doubled-up vocals, a carryover from her performances with Maloo. Yet at the same time she describes her newest music as almost a full-circle return to where she first started as an artist: shedding some of the focus on technology in order to recover the cathartic feeling of her earliest days as a vocalist.
“Maloo was very introspective,” Todd says. “The whole Virtual Womb show was about lying down and doing psychedelics and getting into ten years of trauma in one night. But now I just really want to be present. Not everything has to be worked through. Sometimes, it’s just about screaming and dancing and letting out energy. That’s sort of where I am at this stage in my life.”
She reassures me that Maylee the technologist isn’t going anywhere. There’s her continuing work with the hacked EEG headset and upcoming mentorship initiatives, such as teaching Ableton Live software to beginners. Her focus now, though, is to define a creative practice not by the issues it confronts, but rather by the feeling it gives her.
“Looking back at these shows, there was a lot of me just kind of sitting and singing behind a wall of tech, making sure that everything was running smoothly,” she reflects. “But before I was doing any of this stuff, I was a performer. I was running around with a mic like a chicken with her head cut off. And that was really, really fun to do.”
The projections, the outfits, and the technological freewheeling will continue, she says—but never at the expense of joy. “Making art is already difficult: difficult financially, and difficult to sustain. So if this is going to be a challenge, you have to enjoy it.
“Right now, I’m asking myself, ‘What does enjoyment look like to you this time?’ And for me, I think it’s going to be running around and screaming into a microphone, and having a celebration of some kind. Having a lot of fun.”
SARA CONSTANT is a musician and artist working in various forms of experimental music and sound. She holds degrees from the University of Toronto, University of Amsterdam, and Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg, and she has worked as an organizer of the Toronto Creative Music Lab and curator at the Music Gallery. She is based in Toronto.
LINK: mayleetodd.cargo.site/
H O A N G
FYI: Maylee Todd is working on music for another album for Stones Throw Records and a curating new series with Lincoln Center in New York for Fall 2025. PHO T O
H O N
B Y
36 musıc works #150 | winter 2024/25
