Because of a Flower
If bioluminescence could assume a musical form, it might sound like Ana Roxanne’s *Because of a Flower*. On the Los Angeles-based electronic musician’s second album, dream pop and ambient swirl together, glowing as they drift; in “Venus,” the gentle sound of lapping waves even accompanies her spoken-word ruminations on the nature of liquids, keyboards twinkling like a galaxy reflected in the tide. She has a minimalist’s sense of economy: Most of her music is made of little more than synthesizer and her own multi-tracked and harmonized voice. But her influences are vast, taking in medieval European choral music (“A Study in Vastness”), slowcore (“Suite Pour L’invisible”), new age (“- - -”), trip-hop (“Camille”), and even Hindustani singing (“Venus”). And though the mood is often melancholy, it is never despondent; grief and hope exist in equal measure. As she sings in the spare, searching “Suite Pour L’invisible,” “Endless sorrow, endless joy, endless sorrow/I’ll hold your joy/I’ll hold your pain.”
The sublime songs comprising New York-based musician Ana Roxanne's second record, Because Of A Flower, germinated gradually across five years, inspired by interwoven notions of gender identity, beauty, and cruelty. She describes her process as beginning with “a drone element and a mood,” then intuiting melody, syllables, and lyrics incrementally, like sacred shapes materializing from mist. The experience of identifying as intersex informs the album on levels both sonic and thematic, from spoken word texts borrowed from tonal harmony textbooks to cinematic dialogue samples and castrati aria allusions. It's an appropriately interstitial vision of ambient songcraft, a chemistry of wisps and whispers, sanctuary and sorrow, conjured through a fragile balance of voice, bass, space, and texture. Despite a background studying at the prestigious Mills College in Oakland, Roxanne's music rarely feels conceptual, instead radiating an immediate and emotive aura, rooted in the present tense of her personal journey. She speaks of the flower in the title as a body, singular and sunlit, as many petals as thorns, an enigma beholden only to itself. But whether taken as surface or subtext, Because is a transfixing document of a rare artist in the spring of their ascension.
Los Angeles-based musician Ana Roxanne has a background in sacred Catholic choral singing as well as R&B and jazz vocals.
The Californian musician seems to ponder the mutability of gender on her second album, which offers a magical out-of-body experience