Ana Roxanne

Ana Roxanne is a New York-based musician working at the interzone of electric meditation, dream pop, and ambient songcraft. Her self-titled EP was later reissued by Leaving Records before signing with Kranky for her official full-length debut, 2020’s Because Of A Flower. Her inspirations span the secular (R&B divas of 1980s and '90s) and the spiritual (Catholic choral traditions in which she was raised), synthesized into a uniquely intuitive sonic language, equal parts atmospheric and ancient, healing and hermetic.

The sublime songs comprising 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.