Well, the new year has come. We’ve made it to 2015. And while the Back to the Future Part II references have already gotten old only 9 days in, it’s starting to sort of actually feel like we’re entering into that mythical future. Maybe it’s just seeing a very stern and serious ‘5’ at the end of ‘2015’ that’s throwing me off, or maybe it’s my blind optimism that come December, we’ll all be happy with Star Wars Episode VII and whatever sort of primitive hoverboard is thrown our way to make sure Robert Zemeckis at least got that right.

Nevertheless, we’re here now with bright eyes looking hopefully forward, senses eager to experience a new beginning. And that’s exactly what the first 10 seconds of echo vessel‘s newest LP, L.A. Soundtrack, sound like: a machine being turned on for the first time in what seems like forever. Based out of Los Angeles, experimental and electronic artist echo vessel – née Meysell Quintana – pieces together here a dreamy and mournful work full of masterfully assembled samples, DIY vocals, and fixed beats that when played all the way through once or twice, sounds like a music box played to a futurescape not dissimilar to that of Wall-E’s.

Despite its given name and references peppered in here and there of its locality (there’s a surprising and not entirely unwelcome sample of No Doubt‘s “Don’t Speak” in the first half), L.A. Soundtrack has an ubiquitous quality to it, one so well executed in fact, that even a Georgia native like myself, who has never gone further west than the Grand Canyon, can easily comprehend Quintana’s unique and enveloping vision of Los Angeles. At times, it’s celebratory; there are moments that are worth storms of technicolor confetti and late night table top dancing. The first half of the album crescendos into “time away”, in which Quintana and fellow Collected Recordings artist Robert Summerhays pay homage to LCD Soundsystem by applying their own lyrics and Summerhays’ wonderful vocal mannerisms to the tune of “I Can Change”. The tracks that follow, though, direct the album into a much more meditative and lowercase phase, in which Quintana’s weary reveries that seem to be the driving force in his music produce the album’s strongest grouping of songs.

Somehow, and perplexingly so, Quintana has produced here an album that sounds so foreign in this time. L.A. Soundtrack is a reverse time capsule that has somehow found itself being opened in 2015 where it warns us of a once urban paradise, now deteriorating beyond help. And as listeners in the past, we are unable to do anything but listen and understand and prepare for the inevitable.