Transcending the Present at Lollapalooza 2025
Image Credit: Lollapalooza’s official Instagram
I always seem to be running late to a Nourished by Time set. I’d arrived a little late just a month prior to his Gov Ball and seemed to be doing the same at Lollapalooza. It’s a funny coincidence. Either way I’m still excited to hear him live again. Maybe it’s because we were getting closer to his 2025 album release, “The Passionate Ones” or because I was already accustomed to a live set from Nourished By Time. I can say in hearing him live for a second time within a month, I felt more attuned to the particularities of his music.
Nourished By Time’s music is a collage of the past, functioning as a new musical lens for approaching the contemporary musical landscape. The bass player sounds like he’s from the Quiet Storm but the mixes sound like underground music. You never exist in the same world when listening to Nourished By Time. Watching Marcus Brown (Nourished By Time) mixing on a computer to craft clashing melodies, with hyped up instrumentals over blurred sonic moments, you’re constantly moving between soundscapes, which are heavily emphasized in the live performances.
At Lollapolooza, playing around with sound works, blending well with the open spaces surrounding the stage. Julie’s music is haunting. You could call them grunge, but the underlying unsettling feeling calls in a haunted atmosphere that lingers on you. The droned out instrumentals don’t want you to be complacent, you have to look within or outside yourself–in a constant state of questioning. Julie doesn’t sound nihilist, but combined with their stage visuals, there’s a sense of defeatism.
Everything goes static at times (purposefully) and an amp intensifies the sense of dread introduced at the beginning of the set. The muffling of sound combines with sonic themes of being lost in space. In the audience, I constantly felt untethered, ushered into an undefined liminal space. Liminal spaces can exist in the in between, be disconnected from reality or living in a surrealist imagination. However it's defined, it seems to have no definition or tangible meaning other than a boundless untethered existence. These are all feelings during Julie, but in a way also during Nourished by Time’s set.
Both artists don’t seem to desire making music that can easily be defined. You often have to search for the right words that are precise in getting close to the musical idea, but simultaneously accepting what you hear can only be understood through emotion or fantastical visuals. This conjecture explains how more artists are creating music that evades simple logic, yet interrupts our senses to draw us into something unlike our reality, while working within it.
Magdalena Bay’s set is more forward with this concept. With clear surrealist visuals that collapse a multiplicity of worlds into a three-dimensional space. More artists seem interested in having us challenging our reality, but going into a sense of knowing that’s more innate yet illogical. This completely foregoes how we’ve been taught to understand the world–possibly because some contemporary artists understand its limitations. Not only does it expand possibilities but forces us to dive deeper, searching for the exact place within us that music lives.