BECAUSE OF A FLOWER

The sublime songs comprising Los Angeles-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
Of A Flower is a transfixing document of a rare artist in the
spring of their ascension.