Defying any one label, MMOONN is a deeply textural and cosmic record created by Los Angeles-based composer and producer Nicolas Snyder and interdisciplinary vocalist Odeya Nini. MMOONN merges the improvisational and compositional skill of two artists who have each honed a personal sound for many years: Odeya Nini with her embodied dynamic vocals, and Nicolas Snyder with his textural multi-instrumental work.

MMOONN orients listeners in an enticing, liquid musical realm while also reinventing the spatial possibilities of sound.  There is a sense of sonic terra firma while also inviting a realm of outer space, deep time, and unified consciousness. The tracks on this debut record merge Odeya’s grounded to ethereal vocal range and Nicolas’s lush and electric soundscapes on the Soma Terra, a new kind of synth out of Eastern Europe that looks like a lump of wood with brass nodules and knobs, something at once alien and terrestrial -looking and sounding. Nicolas’s voice is heavily featured as well. He tends to sing high soaring falsettos while Odeya creates a deep and guttural vocal underbelly, often animalesque in timbre.

Odeya Nini and Nicolas Snyder first met in a cavernous tunnel, high in the peaks of the San Gabriel Mountains in 2021. Odeya was performing a solo set with only her voice and its reverberations for the then blossoming outdoor live performance series, “Floating”, in Los Angeles. “The performance felt like something ancient and primal,” says Snyder. “She was making sounds I had never heard in a vocal performance before, but something more than just her voice was being transferred. It awoke something in me. A desire to reconnect with my own voice in a new way.”

Starting out his career as a vocalist in the 2010’s indie band boom, Snyder’s artistry has covered a wide spectrum of projects from cinematography to composing music for animation, film and dance. His most recent work has been composing for HBO Max’s animated space opera Scavenger’s Reign as well as Adult Swim’s psychedelic comedy-thriller Common Side Effects.  “I looked Odeya up after the performance and saw that she gave lessons in something called vocal-embodiment. That sounded intriguing to me. I reached out.” They began meeting for lessons in a wooded grove of Los Angeles’ Elysian Park and quickly realized a kindred musical spirit. “I could tell from the start that Nic had a deep connection with his voice. I felt like our open channels could sense the other’s frequency, which is the space where music is created in real time.” 

After working together for some time, Odeya then sang on some of Snyder’s soundtrack work. The scene in Common Side Effects where Marshall first drops the blue angel mushrooms into a dead pigeon’s beak, bursting into a cosmic scene of rebirth, features Odeya’s vocals. “She just nailed everything, first or second take. “She was super easy to work with” Nic recalls.” A few months later he suggested the two make a collaborative album. “We both had limited time but would get together a few evenings a month with zero concept of what we were going to make and just see what happened”, says Snyder. The first track they made was a five minute long drone track called “Blizzard,” named for the swirling, dense, snow storm-weather landscape. “The Soma Terra has a sound you can just feel and it opened up a world of tactile sonic play between us. “Blizzard” began that play portal for this album” says Odeya. 

Odeya’s work extends the scope of vocal expression, whether as a solo artist, composer, sound healing practitioner or master teacher-facilitator. As Mark Swed wrote in the LA Times: “Nini gave the sheer power of her vocal prowess, reaching notes deep as the earth and reaching twinkling harmonics meant for dog’s ears.”  Celebrated music critic Alex Ross of The New Yorker witnessed Nini’s performance of I See You during Wild Up’s 2021 Darkness Sounding festival and wrote: “One day, I sat with the composer-vocalist Odeya Nini in a small park in Mount Washington, while she performed her piece I See You. No one else was there. It felt like music being reinvented note by note, after the deluge.” It is from this oceanic capacity that Odeya’s musicianship co-creates in MMOONN.

“I expected us to complete the album in a month or two, but it took us nearly a year and a half to complete,” says Snyder. Eventually the duo invited renowned jazz and experimental drummer Max Jaffe to add percussive sparks and propelling rhythms to the tracks. Saxophonist Patrick Shiroishi also lent his powerful sound to the recording of From The Mother. As a group, MMOONN’s first public performance was for a packed audience at the Warehouse at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA in Los Angeles. The group is now ready to share their sound with the world. Their self-released, self-titled album MMOONN comes out April 10th, 2026.