There is a line from an animated anthology of Matrix tie-ins (The Animatrix, © Warner Bros. Home Entertainment (2003)) that's been hard-coded into my brain: "To a machine, all reality is virtual." I always took this to mean that when a being is running entirely according to a program, its existence is defined by probabilities rather than choices, and it can't have a personal stake in any outcome. This might be fine for browser plug-ins, electric sheep, and sentinel drones, but not for creatures of a makeup and constitution like our own. As humans, we are bound by consequences and the definition that our actions deliver on to us. Depending on how you look at it, this can be the utmost meaning of freedom or the domain of total tyranny. I think the ease of navigating the internet and the degree of anonymity it can afford allows an escape from this dichotomy to a degree. Our adventures spelunking through the wake pool of the web have the potential to trap us in nihilistic feedback loops and dissociative disorders, but just as likely, these excursions can lend us the opportunity to examine ourselves from an appropriate and critical distance, or even grant us the space to try on new roles with a great degree of flexibility and on a graduated learning curve. Maloo is just such a vehicle for Canadian singer and producer Maylee Todd. She is the title character of Maylee's latest album, as well as a real avatar that the artist designed for a virtual experience that aims to help people develop better approaches to their mental health. Despite the open possibilities of the world wide web in which its titular character inhabits, Maloo is actually one of the more constrained albums of Maylee's discography. It is very "internety" in that it can appear on the surface to be born out of one of the untamed new agey segments of a Fire-Toolz album, but the wild variance of jazz and folk styles that you might expect from Maylee's work are here mostly funneled into subdued echos of rinsey synth stirs and R'nB with the textural form of a ripple in a reflective pool that had just caught a plummeting bead, shook free from a floating crystal chandelier. This is not to the album's detriment as Maylee's consistency of approach on this release is characterized by a persistent and assured engagement with a limited tool kit which has the effect of unlocking the full magnetic potential of her elective gadgetry. In other words, she does a lot with a little, and proves that a little can go a long way. The economical dreamscape she has seeded and cultivated is captivatingly unreal and liberatingly weightless without severing its umbilical relations to the realm of incarnate humanity in all its triumph, fear, folly, and fealty. The digital dimension is a plane of bright, even blinding shadows. It can help illuminate the world you inhabit, but it can never fully displace it or supersede the life that you have been given to explore it with.
