Since she’s an ambient artist, it might be a given that Ana Roxanne does everything as slowly and quietly as her gorgeous music. When she calls me in late December from her apartment in Bushwick, Brooklyn, loudly passing cars obscure her soft, whispery voice more than once during our hour-long conversation. But according to the queer Filipinx musician, she acted this way before she even knew what ambient music was. Upon graduating from high school in the Bay Area, where Roxanne was born and raised, she initially thought she wanted to be a jazz singer, one that “always picked the slowest, saddest songs in the entire repertoire.” “I would arrange them in a way that was just really slow and quiet,” she tells them. “That was always just my vibe.”
So it’s no surprise that Roxanne’s latest record, Because of a Flower, is a culmination of five years of writing and two decades spent coming to terms with her gender identity, after she first learned she was intersex at age 18. The earliest tracks, “Untitled” and “A Study in Vastness,” were written while she was still attending Mills College, a small university in Oakland well-known for its electronic music program and its “strong queer community,” where she first started to merge her love of jazz with choral music, Hindustani music, and experimental music. The other songs slowly began appearing in Roxanne’s life after she had graduated and moved to Los Angeles in 2015, a time when she was struggling with gender dysphoria and the feelings of isolation she had endured since she first learned of her intersex status without anyone to “connect with” about it.
“I was slowly playing with the idea of coming out, and I started finding solace or release in writing about it,” Roxanne explains. She eventually did come out in October 2018 through an Instagram post, writing, “I wanted to let you know that this is what an intersex person looks like. I am intersex.”
A year after, she realized that she might have an album on her hands. “They all seemed to carry this thread of meaning,” she says of the songs on Because of a Flower. Throughout, she uses symbols like water and tonal harmony as metaphors for the transcendent beauty of gender fluidity. And on “Take the Rose, Leave the Thorn,” Roxanne makes her most pointed statement by sampling the 19th century Italian castrato singer Alessandro Moreshi, who was intentionally castrated before puberty in order to retain his high voice; the unethical practice calls to mind that of non-consensual surgeries on intersex children in the U.S., which advocates are currently fighting to end.
Roxanne released the album last November to critical acclaim, for its “swirling textures,” her “quietly potent voice,” and the deeply personal themes at its core. The musician chatted with them. to go deeper on how she made the record and what each of its samples meant to her.
