The album cover looked like a missing poster. Maybe a lost negative, colored wrong in a darkroom. ~~~, Ana Roxane’s debut EP and breakout moment, was both beautiful and unnerving, the music reflecting the album art. When seen from different angles at different times, it could play tricks on the heart, Roxanne’s intent and emotions guarded and unknowable as she flickered like a spirit through haunting ambient tunes.
Her first album came only a year later, but any Roxanne fan has waited a mighty long time for the follow-up. Poem 1 arrives six years after Because of a Flower, a timeline that matches the glacial pace of the songs on Poem 1. Roxanne’s closest contemporaries—Julia Holter, Julianna Barwick, Grouper—use similar palettes of sound: slow and churning, classically inspired, achingly beautiful. All of them are working in a nexus of pop, choral, and ambient music. But Roxanne was the minimalist amongst them. The amount of silence she allows in her songs is almost uncomfortable, taking a drawn out pause as the audience coughs. With Poem 1, she both uses space and punctures it with flashes of maximalism to be more vulnerable than ever
She addresses this directly early in the album, referring to Poem 1 as “a sound that is breaking.” Throughout, the mic is so close to her mouth you can hear it opening and closing, her tongue clicking on her teeth. There’s an influence from lowercase music here, near-ASMR moments that take the tiniest fragments of sound and will, on occasion, blow up into the foundation of a song. The playing itself is simple, unadorned, but creates a wall of sound similar to Radiohead’s spatial experiments in “All I Need.”
Poem 1 wrestles with maximalism and starkness. There’s the suddenly doubled piano on “Berceuse in A-flat Minor, OP.45” with Roxanne replicating the main chord progression an octave down and blown out, trembling with power—a sonic embodiment of the sense of heartache that pervades the album, regardless of dynamic. “X” has a heartbeat like pulse radiating from an organ buzzing at such a wild timbre that it’s genuinely uncomfortable. There are also the Kinny Landrum-esque synths on “Wishful (draft)” that drone malevolence. The fuzz in the background of “Keepsake” is so strong it becomes its own textural character, cavernous and humming alongside Roxanne.
The hypnotic “Untitled II” is the first time drums are introduced. Even while limited to only brushes on a hi-hat and the snare, the room sound and digital buzz from the recording is almost as loud as the actual playing. It recalls the texture work on Áine O’Dwyer’s brilliant Music for Church Cleaners, using a room as its own character and the physical touch of each instrument as important as the notes it produces. Poem 1 is a constant reminder that a human recorded these songs in a space. The environment and the objects within occasionally overwhelming the music itself.
Roxanne decorates Poem 1 with brief flashes of pop hooks. “Keepsake,” beyond the fridge buzz background, sounds like a weary jazz standard, something that could be heard in the back of the bars Tom Waits used to play. Her choral training is obvious and stunning as she loops and harmonizes with herself. When a chorus of Ana Roxannes dot closer “Atonement,” they flutter above a long string drone cascading down like rain.
But her most powerful moments are often her softest: like simply singing “don’t go” over and over again. The most meaningful maxim in Poem 1 happens during “Keepsake,” when Roxanne sings, “It can never be over, it can never grow.” That harkens back to the core theme of Roxanne’s work: wholeness. On Because of a Flower, she came out as intersex. When she first connected with a community of other intersex women she said, “The symbol was an orchid… there’s different species on the planet that are hermaphroditic or have ‘male’ and ‘female’ parts.” The intersex flag focuses on wholeness as well, a single purple circle in the middle of yellow. Poem 1 seeks a similar cohesion, finding things that could be seen as contradictions and ensuring they sit in balance instead. In Roxanne’s hands, there is harmony. [Kranky]
Nathan Stevens is a musician, archivist, and podcaster whose work has appeared in Spectrum Culture, Stereogum, and Popmatters. He currently runs the music interview website Woodhouse.
