In the Round: Ana Roxanne

About

As part of ICA's *In The Round* series, Serious present Ana Roxanne. "I wanted to travel / Home into somewhere," Ana Roxanne breathes across an eerie suspended drone on 'The Age of Innocence'. "I wanted to try / And go very far." These are the first words we hear on 'Poem 1' and reintroduce an artist who's in a conspicuously different phase of her life than she was when her debut album, 'Because of a Flower', sprouted nearly six years ago. Heartbroken and reflective, Roxanne surveys the transformations that followed and displays a new- found boldness. Her voice is naked, vulnerable and alive, no longer shrouded in tape noise or looped and echoed beyond recognition beneath layered electroacoustic textures. Throughout the course of 'Poem 1', Roxanne displays her skill as a singer and songwriter in the classic sense, using the limited instrumentation simply to accent her exposed tones. Muted piano phrases and plucked bass notes languidly trail her anguished siren song on 'Berceuse in A - flat Minor, Op. 45', making each word count. On 'Keepsake' meanwhile, she sounds a s if she's alone in an abandoned bar, stroking the dust off the piano's keys as she inventories her emotional scars. There's a smell of old whisky in the air, but 'Poem 1' is a remarkably sober album; never wallowing in self pity, Roxanne finds catharsis in the logic of her expressions, twisting out the edges of her memories into surreal, cinematic asides. 'Untitled II', the album's pronounced, uninhibited centerpiece, delivers on the Lynchian promise that's been present since her first EP, 2019's '~~~'. "\[I \] always picked the slowest, saddest songs in the entire repertoire," she explained to them in 2021, recounting her teenage dream of being a jazz singer. "I would arrange them in a way that was just really slow and quiet, that was always just my vibe." Purring over a brushy, decelerated rhythm and funereal piano, Roxanne glances the edge of a hot spotlight, cutting through the stage smoke with her glassy evocations.