I walked into the Variety Playhouse on the night of Sept. 24 for Magdalena Bay’s Imaginal Mystery Tour, but also a new, dreamy world of imaginations: a mirror with wings, sunflowers, aliens, flying CDs and a monster hand. A month after the release of their latest album, “Imaginal Disk” (2024), the L.A.-based synth-pop band shared a surreal night with fans in one of Atlanta’s most distinctive neighborhoods, Little Five Points.
In a recent interview with Vogue, the band said that their concept for the album was about an alien injecting a disk into a human’s brain, a story about the future metamorphosis of humankind. Their concert in Atlanta successfully portrayed the album concept to the audience with a kaleidoscope of costumes, non-stop music, surreal singing and an imaginative flamboyant stage design.
The concert consisted of three parts, and in each section, the vocalist Mica Tenenbaum switched costumes in accordance with the section’s theme. The beginning immediately pulled the audience into the album’s alien story by showing a close-up of a non-blinking eye in the projected mirror on stage. The screen then displayed a POV of one falling through the layers of clouds into a strange grassland, and the band began their opening song “She Looked Like Me!” The song depicts a person finding a reflection of herself and then pondering what her life means. Tenenbaum wore a blue dress during this portion, depicting a sense of unknown.
Tenenbaum interacted with herself in a different dress on the mirror screen, prompting the audience to consider how humankind has changed in a new age of technology and artificial intelligence. They mostly performed their songs from their latest album, but also intersected them with signatures from the previous album “Mercurial World” (2021), like “You Lose!” and “Secrets (Your Fire).”
Tenenbaum’s voice was ethereal — but sweet and steady, as if it were that of an explorer not from the mortal world. Tenenbaum's voice captured me when I first started listening to Magdalena Bay. It was hard to imagine that her voice was human instead of a virtual artist from a cyberpunk world, angelic to the degree that it sounded artificial. I initially thought that the synthesizer helped her achieve her unreal voice, but Magdalena Bay’s live show only proved her unique singing abilities.
The band had no breaks in between their songs. Each song moved slowly into the next, just as they did on the band’s most recent album. Even when Tenenbaum was introducing the theme of the night, her talking blended with the music and the audience had no chance to escape from the narrative of their album throughout the concert.
When Magdalena Bay introduced themselves, the band did not explicitly say their name, but only uttered repetitively that they welcomed the audience into a new chapter of the world. Using a tone that is specifically slow, rising and falling rhythmically, Tenenbaum sung spoke as if she were an otherworldly being, introducing a surreal experience to the audience.
The second section of the concert came with the song “Tunnel Vision,.” a song about opening new perspectives to a changing world, inaugurated the section section of the concert. Tenenbuam changed into a flamboyant red dress with planets as decorations on it, while the guitarist, Matthew Lewin, dressed up as True, the fictional character in the story of “Imaginal Disk” who inserts the alien disk inside a human mind. Lewin performed the disk insertion live on the stage with Tenenbaum, making the concert feel like a movie.
In this section, the band sang more passionate songs like “Cry For Me” and their older classic hit “Killshot” (2020). Lewin’s guitar and piano solos elevated the excitement of the concert to another level. People in the pit danced to the flickering red and green light, and people in the back seats also jumped and swayed in the limited space.
To close out the show, Tenenbaum changed into a white tulle skirt with angel wings on her back, making many of the audience members gasp at her beauty. The band finished their set list with the last song from “Imaginal Disk,” “The Ballad of Matt & Mica,” which describes the feelings of a human living in a faraway place from human beings. However, it is also a song of remembrance between the two members of the band, Matt and Mica. Their friendship started as a romantic relationship in high school, but it was their making of music that brought them back from the break-up when they started college in different states. This song merges both musical clips and images from previous songs to illustrate the beauty of metamorphosis and of embracing various changes in life. Tenenbaum looked like an angel dancing around on the stage while her voice, even after two hours of straight singing and dancing, retained its lofty but powerful characteristic.
With the overwhelming volume of applause after the performance, the band returned to the stage for an encore with one of their previous hits “The Beginning” (2021).
I left the venue mesmerized by the concert. Each song in the performances had its own movie projected onto the mirror screen, and each song sounded exactly like their studio version, only with more interactive instrumentals and dancing. The entire performance was a portal ready to transfer the audience with the band into a dream about humanity’s future.
