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Secret Sounds & triple j Present
MAGDALENA BAY
(USA)
IMAGINAL MYSTERY TOUR

Alt-pop music duo Magdalena Bay, composed of couple Mica Tenenbaum and Matthew Lewin, are headed back down under for their first-ever headline tour of Australia. Get ready for a night of technicolour out-of-this-world wonder as Magdalena Bay bring the Imaginal Mystery Tour to Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne.

Magdalena Bay are hot off the heels of releasing their sophomore album Imaginal Disk, touring the Imaginal Mystery Tour in the states to sold out crowds, and recently putting on a powerhouse performance on Jimmy Kimmel Live. With their UK and Europe show dates this month selling out fast, Magdalena Bay are quickly proving to fans around the world that their live performance is not one to be missed.

Secret Sounds Presale starts Monday 18 November at 10am local time. 
Tickets to the general public will go on sale Tuesday 19 November at 11am local time. 

ABOUT MAGDALENA BAY
Somewhere in the ether/net of our collective social cosmos soup floats the magical, masterful pop music of Magdalena Bay, the duo from Los Angeles composed of Mica Tenenbaum and Matthew Lewin who is readying to release a timeless new relic of modern sound called Imaginal Disk.

While the pair may claim California as its terra firma, its true home is in the cloud/s, from where the two emit and output the unique yet familiar frequencies of synthesized nostalgia, kitschy catchiness, and bombastically warped neo-hooks for which the group has become celebrated. Transmitting in both the audio and video realms, Magdalena Bay is an entity adroitly suited for these times, caught in a haze of the known and felt while pushing sonic landscapes woven with the now into the next.

Having met as teenagers in a high school music program in their hometown of Miami (Tenebaum having moved to Florida at age 1 from Buenos Aires), each quickly recognized a kismet and kindred spirit in the other, resulting in the formation of a band, the prog outfit Tabula Rasa, as well as a romance. Lewin was a self-styled guitar shredder armed with his dad’s prog and concept rock records — The Wall, The Bends, Genesis, Fiona Apple — while Tenenbaum was a pianist and singer dipping toes in indie (Modest Mouse) and emo (My Chemical Romance) rock as well as pop made by princesses (Shakira, Britney). Both could read music and Lewin had even studied music theory, also teaching himself how to produce, record, and mix while making two Tabula Rasa records. The pair took a brief break from dating and headed to different colleges but kept the band together, often trading eight-hour bus rides from Penn to Northeastern and vice versa to rehearse, before eventually realizing two things: one, their relationship was too real to be denied, and two, no one young likes prog.

“It was like, ‘No one's listening to our prog music, what a shame,’” Tenebaum says with a laugh. “We were excited to try something different. So we got into the mechanics of ‘what does it mean to write a pop song?’ and ‘what is this craft?’ and that was the beginning of Magdalena Bay.”

“I remember thinking, ‘Pop music is simple, so we should be able to make it,’” Lewin says. “And then, of course, there's way more to it, lots of complexities in the writing and production that I wasn't aware of. We had no artistic perspective at that point because we were still figuring out the genre and how to make something that resembled pop music before we could think about how we could make it interesting. So that was our early process.”

Holding tight to that all-encompassing genre descriptor (“We make pop, but what really is pop anyway?” Tenenbaum says, while Lewin counters, “We're a pop group making pop music; all the rest is implied...I think it's fun to imply that pop music is a wide range of things”), the duo released a grip of EPs and singles before launching its debut album Mercurial World 

in the fall of 2021. Many outlets, while uniformly praising its melodic hooks, sing-song vocals, and meticulously-crafted production, called it “synth-pop,” which is probably the most specific subgenre Lewin and Tenenbaum will allow. Regardless, the mark had been made, and Magdalena Bay soon began to gather respect, adulation, and fans in the true currency of the day: streaming numbers, social media followers, support slots, festival appearances, and creative collabs. All the while, aided by its highly stylized online aesthetic and internet presence, the band was inching closer to realizing something of an artistic perspective after all.

“We love extending the world of our music past sound into videos or a website or graphics or whatever it might be,” Tenenbaum says.

“We like to think of them as one and the same, but I think it has to start with the music,” Lewin says. “We're trying to create an atmosphere or an emotional quality with it.”

“It's the jumping off point that inspires the rest,” Tenenbaum agrees. “But as the years have gone by, as we’ve made more and more videos and such, the process has become more integrated. As we were finishing the music for this new album, we were having visual ideas, which was never the case before. I guess people call it ‘world-building.’”

The world of Imaginal Disk and its 15 tracks of hooky, thumping, irresistibly moody, and intelligent songcraft is unlike any notion of pop music you may be able to conjure. Written predominantly in 2023 from sketches begun during gaps in touring over 2021 and 2022, and then recorded primarily at the band’s home studio in Los Angeles before being mixed by Dave Fridmann (MGMT, Tame Impala) in rural New York — marking the group’s first time working with an external engineer — the album keeps one foot firmly in the future while revisiting the recent past in a completely fresh way. If the duo were to list its various inspirations and influences for the album in a scattershot list of nonsequiturs, it might include Joni Mitchell, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Jean-Paul Sartre’s plays, The Beatles, Lacanian psychoanalysis, In Rainbows, Margaret Atwood, and the Polish novel Solaris. 

While writing Mercurial World the band had listened almost exclusively to contemporary pop music, but while working on this album the duo admits to avoiding any new music almost entirely. As a result, Disk abounds with acoustic drums and live instrumentation, lending an organic warmth and cohesiveness to its layers. 

“While making this record, we were more open to experimenting and not sticking to the pop formula, and I think we realized what a Magdalena Bay song sounds and feels like,” Lewin says. “We’ve developed something unique to us and we’ve formed our sound or style, and we learned that the only way we can make something that we feel represents us is to do it on our own.” 

“Something about this music feels a little different,” Tenenbaum adds. “We're not as worried about sticking to a prescriptive structure, and it felt very free making these songs. Maybe it's just taken us this long to finally combine all the facets of what we listen to but also what we like and what we want to make as musicians. The process of making music together is so natural that when we sat back and sequenced everything and listened, it was almost like the album existed in and of itself. Yeah, it's probably a little more experimental, but hopefully people like that. This is it in its final form, and the rest will just have to be what it is.”

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