Water, California, doesn’t exist on any map that I’m aware of. At least, I can’t find any place by that name—neither town, nor burg, nor suburb, nor metropolis. But thanks to a brief, breezy new album by Los Angeles’ Daniel Memmi, aka Donatell, I have a good idea of what Water might be like if it did exist: a city of perpetual dusk, where the glow of sodium-vapor streetlights slices through slatted blinds, and where the streets are always empty—save, perhaps, for the occasional car gliding noiselessly past living rooms stained blue with the nightly news.

If Italo Calvino had dreamed up Water for his Invisible Cities, he might have imagined it as a place with more screens than people, a city populated solely by screens: screens talking only to one other, faltering unison voices falling out of sync, a daisy chain of recent pasts and slightly less recent pasts, a time loop with a lazy, elliptical flow. A city of screens, and thus also a city of tropes—signs and symbols that have lost all interest in pointing to anything beyond themselves, happy simply to inhabit their own calcified shapes: scene-setting string vamps; half-recognizable scraps of half-remembered pop songs; chipper snippets of vintage television commercials, which is to say, the scripture of America’s only true religion.

Memmi’s online footprint isn’t much bigger than the nonexistent locale’s. He’s got a co-write credit on 2022’s “Give Love to Get Some,” a feel-good one-off by Chromeo’s David Macklavitch and his brother A-Trak; he’s also a co-writer of Beyoncé’s “Virgo’s Groove,” off 2022’s Renaissance. He got that gig when someone on Beyoncé’s team heard some of his work alongside fellow L.A. singer-songwriter (and high-school buddy) Leven Kali. And as the mononymic Memmi, he released a lone EP of futurist, silkily psychedelic R&B in 2021. But none of that material sounds anything like Water, CA. If those projects suggest an ambitious songwriter trying to get a foothold in the industry, his new album sounds more like the product of private obsession: a set of theories mulled and ideas jotted down quickly, before his first cup of coffee, before his invisible city can dissipate beneath the first rays of dawn.

The sound of the album is a kind of instrumental ambient pop, and the trappings are often squarely retro—pitch-bent synth patches that bring to mind old Keyboard magazine ads, chorused guitars that burble like champagne, burly low-end tones just this side of slap bass’s percussive thonk. But the overall shape of the music is too amorphous and too mercurial to be pinned down to anything as hidebound as pastiche. “Panting Hum” opens the album with a glowing electric bass note, flickering streaks of synth, and a subtly churning pulse. A rattling steel-pan fill, borrowed from reggae, gives way to the kind of ringing guitar chord once favored by new-wave acts like the Fixx, a sound steeped in the pixelated brio of early MTV.

A similar palette carries across the album. Memmi often seems more interested in color and texture than in composition. In “JV Jordan,” a bright squiggle of distorted guitar scrawls across a hazy backdrop of string synths and ticking triangle, like a fingertip drawing curlicues in a fogged mirror. After a minute, the forward motion stops, and glitchy chords expand to fill the emptiness. Most Donatell songs don’t really go anywhere, and no single instrument takes a leading role; instead, they all float in space and time, forming constellations of cloudy shapes, cottony satellites blinking back and forth.

In both his archaeological instincts and his atmospheric inclinations, Memmi follows directly in the footsteps of Oneohtrix Point Never, as well as more recent comers similarly attuned to the technological rearview, like ML Buch and Total Blue. Like those artists, he’s got a keen sense for the ways that pop music’s vernacular, arranged just so in a museum vitrine, can be made suddenly strange. In “Emotion in Entertainment,” he offers what sounds like a momentary interpolation of Bruce Hornsby’s “The Way It Is” played on a very expensive synthesizer; the gesture has all the accidental pathos of a divorced dad trying out keyboards at Guitar Center.

Despite the occasional spoken interjection—“What if you could transform?” asks a sourceless voice in “JV Jordan,” while in “N/A,” another simply marvels, “Fantastic”—Water, CA’s overall effect is largely vibes-based. Occasionally, the music seems to lead toward an anthemic chorus that never comes; the choice to pull back in those moments, to opt out of a bigger emotional payoff, feels intentional. I sometimes wonder what would happen if Memmi gave his two- and three-minute sketches a longer runway. But even as they are, Donatell’s setpieces are both captivating and unexpected.

In the title track, which closes the album, placid synths and synthetic steel pans trace a watery, Satie-like melody before simply petering out, followed by some 15 seconds of silence. But then, surprise: A new set of keys and chiming guitars fade into earshot, full of Weather Channel optimism. It goes on like that for a few minutes more, beaming with the promise of a new day—a proper hidden track, the kind that once came tucked away in the final minutes of CDs. The anachronistic gambit suits an album like Donatell’s: a bygone form, leading to points unknown.