Description
Label Review.
2019 debut mini album. Ambient vocal.
Our Overview.
Born in the San Francisco Bay Area to Southeast Asian parents, Ana Roxanne grew up on a diet on R&B divas from the 80s/90s and the communal choruses of the choirs from the catholic church. The upbringing inspired a deep desire to sing, be it at mass, family gatherings or with the jazz ensemble from her high school. Eventually, she went on to study jazz and classical music formally, and travelled to India to live and learn with a teacher of classical Hindustani singing.
Swirling within the smoky ambience and subtle drones of opening track, “Immortality”, the first words on the release make this clear. “I was only dreaming,” Roxanne says in a plain, spoken-word delivery. “A past encounter resurfacing / from deep violet water.” In keeping with the meditative aims, the track never rises beyond its subdued sound, and indeed neither does follow-up “Slowness” - the background drones never making good on their threat to push through the digital babble.
“It’s a Rainy Day On The Cosmic Shore” presents tidal field recordings pocked not by natural drizzle but rather a static buzz, a natural world melded to the digital, while “Nocture” explores the stasis of late-night worrying, the body’s solitude matched by the soaring breadth of the mind’s wandering. The track is a good example of the sensitivity of the record, Ana Roxanne dropping guard and caution in order to more fully delve into the unseen. “Be it romance, love, or worship of a deity,” explains the album description, “in order to access such depths of emotional expression, one must be willing to be intensely vulnerable, lay one’s heart in the open air, expose what is kept hidden.”
The hauntological tone of “I’m Every Sparkly Woman” evokes a version of reality that never came to pass, before closer “In a Small Valley” draws things back the the present, finding beauty and meaning in the quotidian. The song highlights the true purpose of the album, Roxanne’s art not some linear quest toward a higher level of existence, but rather a considered attempt to understand and explore that which is around her.