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.
No score yet, be the first to add.
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.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
