Malukah is the artist name of Judith de los Santos. She is a Mexican composer and singer-songwriter known for her cover versions of music from video games or TV series and movies, which she publishes on YouTube. She became known to an international audience when a video of her cover of the song The Dragonborn Comes from the game became a viral video in November 2011. Since then she has contributed to several Video Game Soundtracks, composed and produced original music, and performed live.
Career
Early career and education
Being a gamer since childhood, Judith de los Santos grew up with gaming related music. She started writing songs and singing at the age of 15, took guitar, piano and percussion lessons to later study at the Berklee College of Music. She graduated in 2005 with a dual major in Music Production and Engineering and Film Scoring with her debut albumAll of the Above.
In November 2011, shortly after the release of, her cover version of the game's song The Dragonborn Comes went viral. The video was reposted on the IGN YouTube channel as well as gaming-related websites and became quickly popular. The original video on her own channel has over 23 million views, while the version on IGN's channel has over 17 million views by February 2020. This and other popular videos, including songs set to music from the Mass Effect, Halo and game series helped her to obtain work in the video game industry. She was commissioned to provide vocals for songs for the game ' in 2012, The Banner Saga franchise. In 2014, she composed and sang the ingame NPC bard songs and the end credits song Beauty of Dawn for the MMORPGElder Scrolls Online. She was invited to be a part of an upcoming symphony project by video game composerJeremy Soule, The Northerner. She provided vocals for music in the short film The Forge, collaborating with Austin Wintory and Tina Guo. She worked with Peter Hollens on a cover version of the Civilization IV Theme Baba Yetu. Together they also worked on a cover of Lullaby of Woe, a song from the soundtrack. Her vocals were featured in the song Outside the Realm in the 2nd season Stranger Things soundtrack. The song was originally composed by Big Giant Circles for the video game There Came an Echo and was reused as thematic music for this purpose. She also worked with Miracle of Sound on his popular song Legends of the Frost based on the video game '. She is featured on the soundtrack. She provided vocal effects for the game Far Cry Primal working with BAFTA award-winning composer Jason Graves. Recently, she contributed to the soundtracks of the video games ' and the PlayStation 4Virtual reality gameMoss. She and other musicians were invited by CD Project musical director Marcin Przybyłowicz to participate in a music video that recreates ' main theme to celebrate the game's 5th anniversary in 2020.
Live performances, streaming and original music
She performed the Halo tribute song Frozen Sleep at the Halo Global Championships 2013 at PAX Prime. Furthermore, she performed video game music at SXSW and The Game Awards. She was a guest performer at the Video Games LiveE3 concert 2014 in Los Angeles and in her hometown Monterrey in 2016. She was invited to sing at The Elder Scrolls Online tavern community event during Gamescom 2018 in Cologne, Germany. She performed at the Argentina Game Show in Buenos Aires in 2019 and the CES 2020 in Las Vegas. Malukah streamed as a partnered streamer on Twitch for almost 1,000 hours between 2016 and 2020, having reached 662,000 views and 38,800 followers in the music & performing arts and gaming category. Since 2020, she focused live streaming on YouTube. In 2019, she released her latest original album I Follow the Moon.
Style and genre
Her two original albums mostly cover the genres Pop rock or Folk rock. Collaborations with other musicians like Sonic Mayhem or Headhunterz are influenced by electronic music. Her contributions to the games cover the genre of Heavy Metal. The video game contributions, movie related originals, covers and medleys can be classified as fantasy folk rock or fantasy music. Her covers are influenced by music set to games like Mass Effect, The Elder Scrolls, The Witcher,Halo and Destiny, movies like The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings or TV series like Game of Thrones. Her vocal range can be considered as alto.
Malukah's collaborations usually involve other YouTube musicians like singer Peter Hollens or violinist Taylor Davis. For her video game contributions, she repeatedly worked with the composers Austin Wintory and Jason Graves. Further collaborations involved musicians like Elena Siegman, Tina Guo and Kevin Sherwood. Most noted were her collaborations with ZeniMax Online Studios for the bard songs and end credits song of The Elder Scrolls Online and with Treyarch for the franchise, contributing to several of the Zombie easter egg songs.
Two wins in the Rock category at the 16th LA Music Awards as female singer-songwriter of the year and female vocalist of the year, and another nomination in Rock category for best album in 2006.
Trivia
Malukah is known to sing in various real and fantasy languages. For parts of her cover versions from The Elder Scrolls franchise, she sang in dragon language. For her cover version of Priscilla's song from the game she sang one verse in Polish as a tribute to the country, where The Witcher franchise has originated. For The Banner Saga soundtrack she sang in Icelandic. For the Civilization IV theme Baba Yetu she sang in Swahili. For the cover The Fields of Ard Skellig, a song from original soundtrack, she sang in Gaelic.
Her bard songs can be listened to in-game performed by several bard NPCs in The Elder Scrolls Online.
A NPC with the name of Malukah Lightsong was introduced with the Patch 6.2.0 in the video game World of Warcraft.
She wrote a self-published short novel called The Stolen Pendant.
The Skyrimmodding community has added her Dragonborn cover to various game mods.
