When Wim Wenders conceived the movie to become Until the End of the World, he simultaneously imagined a concept for its soundtrack album. The year is 1990 and the science fiction film he’s working on takes place in 1999 — at the cusp of the millennium. For the soundtrack, he brings together many of the edgiest and most artistically daring recording artists in his orbit and offers them a mission: To create a song in 1990 for the soundtrack that projects how their music will sound in the not-so-distant future of 1999.

The resulting album is unique among movie soundtracks/various artist albums in how well all the tracks fit and flow together. Remarkably, the album sounds like a singular vision rather than the contributions of many with its blend of electronic sounds mixed with acoustic instruments, its piercing and dissonant screeches and bird-sound transitions, its droning background vocals and instrumentation and its dark lyrical content and melodies that never emerge from a minor key. Taken together, the songs have a cinematic and narrative sweep that simultaneously relate and don’t relate to the movie itself. (The soundtrack was released in the U.S. in December 1991 and the movie followed in art houses starting in March 1992. This gave early listeners a chance to experience the feel of the movie before getting the chance to see it.)

The artists appearing on the record include two of the world’s most popular band at the moment: U2 (who contribute the title song and stretched the futuristic concept throughout their Achtung Baby! album) and R.E.M. (whose piano-driven contribution, “Fretless,” has a more analog and acoustic feel than the electronics-based albums they released around the turn of the millennium. The album opens with Talking Heads setting the mood with “Sax and Violins” — representing the sound of the future that never happened as the band was in the process of breaking up at the time. The soundtrack also includes art/punk rock vanguards Patti Smith and Fred Smith, Lou Reed and Can; artists making their name at the moment, such as Neneh Cherry, Jane Siberry and K.D. Lang; and prominent 1980s New Wave acts reinventing themselves for the 1990s, including Elvis Costello, Nick Cave and Depeche Mode.

Music often evokes a sense of place (for example, how Bruce Springsteen’s early albums conjure a vibe of the Jersey Shore). The Until the End of the World Soundtrack firmly roots itself someplace, though it’s hard to say where. It doesn’t sound like an America record or European or African or Australian. Rather it sounds like all places at once with the ocean and outer space thrown in for good measure. It’s an album that’s as worldly as it is otherworldly within the same moment.

It’s also an album difficult to place in time. Due to the experimental nature of performing acts imaging their future sound, it does not sound like an album from 1991 (with one foot in the 80s) or from 1999 (with the other foot in the 2000s). The album is an exile without a musical time period to call its own, while sounding as amazingly eerie, fresh and original today as anytime in the last 35 years.