Best of 2024 - Magdalena Bay's "Imaginal Disk"
Deep diving one of my favorite albums of 2024. Magdalena Bay's second studio album is a tightly spun concept that seeks enlightenment of a unique sort
In Philip K. Dick’s classic novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, the official way to prove oneself as a bona-fide human is the Voigt-Kampff test, a fictional version of the Turing test that determines whether a being is self-aware or not. But instead of measuring a computer’s ability to sound human, the V-K test measures the ability of a being to show empathy towards humans. The idea is that humans innately care about other humans, and robots care about, well, whatever they’re programmed to care about. Uncoerced empathy is, allegedly, an unalienable human trait, and finding evidence of it means you’ve found evidence of humanity.
It’s a nice thought. Even though untold numbers of real-life humans might fail the same test of compassion towards their fellow humans, and the androids in Electric Sheep ultimately end up rewriting what it means to embody humanity, the V-K test still rings of optimism. Sure, it’s used in the book as a means of hunting down imposter humans – but flip the script, and the test represents the idea that androids might absorb enough humanity from humans to achieve it for themselves. That they might become human enough to dream, whether of sheep or something even greater.
The cover of Imaginal Disk shows a woman receiving a frontal CD-rom-botomy from a digitalized god-figure, as if she’s downloading the wisdom of the heavens themselves directly into her brain. What is she learning? What heavenly wonders are encoded on this Imaginal Disk? Is she an android embracing humanity, or a human embracing roboticism? Is the disk inserting or ejecting? It’s unclear if we need a Blade Runner or a priest to answer these questions.
The concept-album nature of Imaginal Disk is very fun to unpack, although by the end the imagery feels like as much blunt object as surgeon’s scalpel. The title hints at this single-mindedness as well: the term “imaginal disc” is also used to describe a set of cell-structures in a developing insect. These are like stem cells, identical at first but able to grow into dozens of different structures. Imaginal discs are the unshaped clay of the larval insect – a fitting metaphor for the blank canvas of a brand-new human being who can become whatever they imagine.
As our protagonist evolves from robot into human, so do the sounds – transitioning from big synths to good old fashioned sticks banging on cowhide by the concluding songs. It all points in the direction of achieving humanity through self-awareness, escalating towards the climactic final track where Matt & Mica break the fourth wall and announce themselves, tying the story together and revealing the final destination of all this evolution; they’ve arrived at a new version of themselves, finally pupating into the next iteration of Magdalena Bay.
It would be easy, on a surface level, to relate Imaginal Disk’s metaphorical journey towards sentience to the AI-everything movement of 2024. But to do so is to cheapen the real message of Imaginal Disk; that humanity, in all its flawed and desperate and insecure imperfection, is always the end goal, no matter how digitalized or metallic or robotic our world may appear.
This album is the electric sheep of which all beings in search of empathy can dream; a vision of an ideal yet imperfect condition that both comforts us at night and points our dreams towards a more empathetic – and human – future.