Review: Magdalena Bay - Imaginal Disk (2024)

Fundamentally the album is a pop pastiche of 80s thru 00s musical styles, where the entire historical style becomes condensed into an aesthetic of reference. In other words, a song will "sound like an early 90s rave track", without zeroing in on any specific quality of the period music. It's like it's turning "90s rave music" into a single point of interest that has its own aesthetic despite being a period with a lot of variety internally. However this is important to the album because this compressive function is how nostalgia works. For example, "The 80s" take on their own life as a symbol, especially if you didn't live through the 80s and have no memories of "having been there".

This idea of "time as symbol" vs "time as marking a period one lived through" is essential for understanding what unites the album. One period sound takes on a special quality throughout the album, and interjects itself consistently into the pastiche or collage-like arrangements, and that is the sound of "PlayStation", "vaporwave", a specific synthesized late 90s sound profile, often as dense pads or floating arpeggios that stand "beside" or "above" the pastiche, framing it and giving it context. A lot of tracks have "injections" of PlayStation-sonics surrounding whatever else it's trying to do.

This specific late 90s period represents the moment when nostalgia experienced only as symbol meets the nostalgia of "having been there", but having been there at an age so young as to not fully recall what transpired, as that's about the age of the artists. I believe that nostalgia as aesthetic is essentially rooted in memories from a particular period in childhood, the transition from a sort of "raw" experience to an experience of symbols, and it ultimately refers to the loss that took place for the child when they were forced into the "adult" world of language. So, all nostalgia exists at this threshold, between purely sensuous "animal" knowledge (bolstered by the warmth of consistent caretakers) and symbolic "adult" knowledge.

A long digression, but thematically important because the album's lyrical content is very much about moving through a threshold from a sort of pre-knowledge state into a state of knowledge, of the internet and sex and romance and all these things that await us. This could be read as a purely teenage transition, if not for the specifically nostalgic character of the reflections; a teenage album would place more weight on intensity and authority rather than on this negotiation with warmth and absence, the lost ordinariness, manifest through the womb-like but occasionally dark and dissonant textures of PlayStation-era synthesis, perhaps themselves experienced as a cozy moment of childhood, but also a moment containing fear of what lies beyond...

The other styles as part of the pastiche then wrap around this initial experience of true nostalgia, drawing upon the fantasy of other eras to heighten the album's effect as a paradoxical "contemporary time capsule", the experience of nostalgic reflection as experienced from the present moment from a certain perspective at a certain age.