James Y. Lee
There seems to be no world, medium, or universe that Mica Tenenbaum and Mica Lewin—best known as Magdalena Bay—cannot conquer. The electronic synth-pop and prog-rock duo have long been in the business of innovative sonic textures, staking their claim on the musical landscape with their 2021 debut album, Mercurial World, before following it up three years later with sophomore effort Imaginal Disk. These are sprawling musical tapestries, collections of otherworldly and mystically electronic tracks that deal with our shifting, strange relationships to modernity, technology, and each other. Mercurial World was a potent debut LP, if not somewhat scattershot in the territory it wanted to cover. Imaginal Disk, on the other hand, was such an insanely substantial refinement of their talents that this reviewer did not hesitate for a second to label it the greatest album of 2024 before listening to it repeatedly in the years to come.
Imaginal Disk was accompanied with three music videos for lead singles “That’s My Floor,” “Death and Romance,” and “Image,” each of which were visually stimulating accompaniments to the album’s loosely threaded narrative. The album itself tells the story of True, who embraces and rejects the insertion of the titular Disk in order to rediscover her humanity. And in keeping with the spirit of the album’s continuous story, those three music videos were excerpts of a larger visual narrative and feature directed by Amanda Kramer. As it turns out, Kramer’s directorial expertise in a rather unabashed mode of campy anti-realism—best exhibited by films like Please Baby Please (2022)—complements Magdalena Bay’s vested interest in Y2K-era retro-futurist aesthetics in a mutually perfect and deeply impressive way.
As much as Imaginal Disk the album deals with a protagonist undergoing a journey through her own humanity, its most expressed and intentional strength is in the range of sonic imagination it willingly expresses. Kramer, Tenenbaum, and Lewin’s understanding of Imaginal Disk‘s advantages leads to a companion feature film that feels irreverent in every conceivable respect: to the boundaries of what a music video actually means, to how far this band can push the envelope of their imagination before their ambition comes spilling out of their heads, and to modern aesthetic conceptions of science-fiction.
Among the very first images you’ll see upon stumbling into this film is the sight of an animated ape having the titular Imaginal Disk inserted into its forehead—before a kaleidoscope of images starts exploding out of the film itself, gradually making its way to opening track “She Looked Like Me!” The film itself stays true to being a rigorous companion to the album; no extra dialogue or sounds are present in the film save the tracks of the album, whose tracks run pretty continuously throughout the film’s runtime. As such, each track gets, in effect, its own scene.
“Killing Time” sees Tenenbaum questioning the quotidian passages of time and why we speak about periods of torpor in such murderous terms. And in this feature, Kramer shows True (Tenenbaum) discovering an analog TV ad for the Imaginal Disk as a service to awaken a “brand new Image” in her relatively boring home life. Overseen by a clay-animated smiling wall clock, True makes her way to a doctor’s office for a surgical insertion procedure as “Image” plays. Worth noting is that the “doctor” in question is a truly garish, red-clad, red-masked, red-adorned being who seems to be pursuing True during the procedure as some part of her being seems to evade the process. But the calling must be answered. A slit in True’s head is split open, the disk enters her mind, and the journey of Imaginal Disk through identities, states of being, and otherwise, finally begins.
As the tracks of Imaginal Disk unfold, along with the myriad musical styles they accompany, the film itself seems to create an entire universe of its own. Creatures and humanoids occupy the psychological and material worlds of this film: people with small holes in masks for eyes and mouths, bug-headed individuals carrying pastel-colored blaster rifles, angels taking the form of singular eyes adorned with wings. The aesthetics of the places they exist in are various, never indulging present modes of technology so much as creating a vision of the future out of aestheticizing the past. Peter Gabriel’s music videos are the clearest influence here, harkening back to TV shows of childhoods long past, or Y2K-era technologies and operating systems.
Perhaps the most notable surprise here is Tenenbaum’s central performance as True, and her alter ego Ghost—two entities cut from the same cloth, cleaved into two as the Disk splits True between the self she wants to become and the self she knows she is. The push and pull between True’s embrace and rejection of the disk makes up the symbolically apparent drama of the feature, but more riveting than that itself is the momentum of imagination the film provides, and the spectacle of the music that undergirds it. Channeling that sense of imaginative curiosity is Tenenbaum’s mannerisms, as she’s constantly dancing as a free spirit to the various rhythms of the album (while Lewin is often seen jamming away at a guitar or a keyboard), all while her eyes remain glimmering and open to the sights and senses surrounding her. She’s the one singing the songs; it’s a delight to see her clearly comfortable in her own skin even in front of the camera.
And what a joy it is to observe some of my favorite tracks of the album brought vividly to life on the screen. The gradual synth-rock ecstasy of “Tunnel Vision” is equally as explosive in front of Kramer and cinematographer Patrick Meade Jones’s camera, unleashing hallucinogenic and even frighteningly surreal images as the film bursts at the seams along with the music itself. “Love Is Everywhere,” which channels a more idyllic and charming musical vision driven by harmonies and a bumping bassline, becomes a sort of Teletubbies-esque ode to friendship and joy as True, Lewin, and a couple of friendlier creatures dance under a clear pink-green-hazed sky. “Cry for Me”‘s most prominent cinematic feature is the alien and rocky landscapes that True navigates, awakened to a more fiery facet of her being, all while overseen by a modestly decorated rendition of herself inflated to the size of a giant.
This is not a film that makes sense in conventional means—and it’s not a film that strives for that kind of sense in any form. Kramer, Tenenbaum, and Lewin understand that the core strengths of Imaginal Disk as an album are grounded in the fact that every track jumps from one place to another, as if the album itself remains uncomfortable in its own skin and craves to reinvent itself at every possible turn. When your explicit goal is the cinematic representation of an album so committed to constant self-alteration, the point is deep sensorial and spiritual overwhelm, a journey through corners of one’s psyche and identity that pulls from all sorts of influences while leaping into ever-fascinating territory. This kind of experimental filmmaking, paired with music this visionary, makes for the most riveting and enlightening experiences I’ve had with any film this year thus far. I was giddy with joy at nearly every moment with excitement and awe; this is a journey worth sharing not just with others, but also with the deepest corners of yourself.
