“I’ve always felt like I’m a slower person, compared to a lot of people,” Ana Roxanne said in 2023. She was on a tour stop in Europe, speaking about her debut album, 2020’s Because of a Flower, a beguiling collection of pooling drones, ambient noise, and echoes of her spellbinding voice. She was working on her follow-up, but it wasn’t coming along quickly: “I don’t want to take five years to make this one,” she mused to Pitchfork in 2021.
In the end she didn’t take five years; she took six. But some revelations need space to unfold, and Poem 1 is just that: a revelation. The feelings Roxanne captures are the ones that take the longest to develop—the shapeless internal sensations that can only be coaxed to the surface by blocking out the world and delving inward. This process not only requires time, it asks for a sort of grace. If six years is what Roxanne needs to produce a leap in scale as bracing as Poem 1, then so be it: This will cast shadows deep and long enough to sit underneath for a long time.
Her 2019 EP, ~~~, and her debut explored Roxanne’s relationship to gender expression (she was born intersex). But the music itself yearned for a state outside the body, a place where Roxanne’s voice mingled with the field recordings of lapping water, the reverberant synth tones, and all the other bouncing waveforms inside your headphones, like the echoes rising up from her childhood church choir.
On Poem 1, she sounds more corporeal—a person sitting at a piano bench, drawing breath, laying fingers on keys. On “Keepsake,” she nearly takes the form of a 1970s singer-songwriter—Carole King, maybe—playing two soft and closely voiced chords on the piano while she sings what sounds like a love song: “Oh I can never reach you/So I’ll keep a piece beside me.” But it might also be an evocation of God, her inspiration, or both.
Roxanne is an ambient musician, but she lives by the same credo as early minimalists like Terry Riley or La Monte Young: Hold down one chord long enough, and shapes will begin appearing in it. Add some notes, and you might shudder open cracks in the earth. When Maya Balkaran’s violin line enters on “The Age of Innocence,” it assumes the force of a weather event. The album is full of small, inexplicable moments like this, where the size of the sound is all out of proportion to its effect.
With its insistent pulse, minimalist music often recreates the sensation of yearning, conscious or otherwise, and Roxanne’s lyrics have vast, prayerlike yearnings stirring in them. “I wanted to try/And go very far/A new life that had yet to be/What? Something it never was,” she sings on “The Age of Innocence.” On “Cover Me,” she longs for absolution in stark language that resembles a desire for death: “Cover my past/Cover my pain/Cover what can never be again.”
This is the first time she’s let us appreciate the full and stunning depth of her singing: forceful yet calm, suffused with breath but unerringly clean and clear, creamy-toned but with hints of smoke swirling beneath. She’s arranged everything on the album to bring its commanding power to the forefront. On “Berceuse in A-flat Minor, Op. 45,” her voice is so close to the vocal pop filter that you can nearly hear her breath as it hisses past her teeth. In between her evenly spaced piano chords, her images radiate, leaving afterimages on your brain: “Streetlight/Glowing… Wild wind/Blowing.”
The lyrics for “One Shall Sleep,” meanwhile, come from a 19th century art song by Robert Schumann. The words meditate on human connection, but set against Roxanne’s light-split, shifting synth pads, they resemble another afterlife vision: “From sleep you have risen/And walk through the meadow/Everywhere lies heaven’s wondrous blue,” she intones. Who is she speaking to us as? We don’t know. But Roxanne demonstrates just how much atmosphere can be magicked out of a blot of sound, how far you can take something out of vapors, wisps, and suggestions.
As a reviewer, it can be maddening to find language for this gift—the ability to conjure sounds that quiet the higher faculties—but it has to do with recording as a form of watchfulness. The recording equipment on Poem I seems to pick up not just the room’s tone, but its moisture content, the chill in it, the hint of must in the far room corners. The clarity of the brushes as they drape across the snare head on “Untitled II” feels devotional. On the song, Roxanne sings about the “desire” that “burns through my heart,” and offers a mantra that may have carried her through the past six years: “Closer, closer, to what I want.” As she allows herself to assume shape, we lean in closer, rapt.
For Ana Roxanne
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