Some nights don’t feel like memories in the making, they feel like glitches in the timeline, like messages beamed in from a parallel dimension. On May 16th, inside a SOLD OUT Rialto Theatre in Tucson, Arizona, reality bent to the will of Magdalena Bay as they brought their Imaginal Mystery Tour to life.
The duo, Mica Tenenbaum and Matthew Lewin, met in high school and have since formed a creative force that defies conventional genre borders. With their sophomore album Imaginal Disk, they’ve constructed not just a collection of songs, but a fully realized sonic universe. An immersive, conceptual landscape that explores the timeless question: what does it mean to be human?
The album’s cover art of a demon hand slipping a CD into Tenenbaum’s forehead is not just surrealist flair, it’s a metaphor for mental upload, transformation, awareness, the blurring of memory and imagination. Before hearing a single note, the image suggests something uncanny and electric. Once the music begins, it’s as if those visuals animate and fracture across the listener’s internal screen.
That sense of crossing into another layer of perception didn’t begin with Magdalena Bay, it began the moment the night opened. Detroit-born, LA-based artist Sam Austins, much like the headliners, seems to be a sonic alchemist. Effortlessly conjuring genre-bending soundscapes that blur the lines between alt-pop, hip-hop, and electronic music. An alluring, ecstatic energy emanated from the stage, instantly infecting the crowd. Within moments, the room was full of motion, bodies pulsing to the beat, pulled into his orbit. Sam Austins didn’t just open the night, he cracked it open, and we slipped through already halfway to whatever strange and beautiful dimension Magdalena Bay would soon reveal.
I remember sitting in the photo pit of the Rialto Theatre and staring up into the stage absorbing the incredible set up that Magdalena Bay had brought along with them. To the left, a structure that could only be described as a winged portal stood shrouded in mystery, its purpose and destination yet to be revealed. To the right, a vintage armchair sat beside a lonely window, bathed in warm, still light. It felt like an invitation to step into the past, or maybe a projection of a future not yet lived. At the center of the stage we saw red blocks that would serve as a pedestal to the voice that would be guiding us through the night. It wasn’t just a stage; it was a map, a memory palace, a surreal operating system waiting to boot.
It didn’t take long before our reality became whatever Magdalena Bay wanted it to be. The moment the lights dimmed and the sound collided with the visual spectacle onstage, we were completely consumed and swept into a surrealist science fiction dream of their design. Tenenbaum and Lewin were joined by two touring members whose presence deepened and expanded the sound into something enormous and alive.
As expected, the journey began with the opening track from Imaginal Disk, the appropriately titled “She Looked Like Me!” And there, center stage, stood the performer with the exact face we’ve come to know from the album’s artwork, unreal and familiar all at once. It was as if the figure from the cover had stepped off the digital canvas and into our shared hallucination, the boundary between image and performer now beautifully irrelevant. What followed was a full traversal of the album’s dream logic narrative, each track unfolding like a chapter in some cosmic opera.
We saw visions from another dimension projected through the winged portal, its screen pulsing with cryptic transmissions, like signals intercepted from some distant reality. Eyeballs drifted across the projection, galaxies bloomed and disappeared, and Mica’s face multiplied and mutated appeared in endless variations. At times she smiled with knowing joy; other times her image seemed trapped, pleading silently to be released from a shadowed dimension just out of reach. The visuals weren’t just a backdrop, they were narrative, emotion and mythology. Tenenbaum and company played as if they weren’t of this world at all, they were emissaries from a parallel realm sent to share stories from beyond our understanding.
The energy both on and off the stage was electric and strange, it felt like we were witnessing not just a performance, but a transformation, a shedding of human limitation in favor of something transcendent. And as the figures onstage evolved before our eyes, so did we. We weren’t just watching a show, we were being rewritten. As the final notes echoed and the lights faded, it felt less like the end of a show and more like waking from a collective vision.
