There’s something perfect about Ana Roxanne playing in the round, as she did at London’s the ICA on Thursday night. Her music, while delicate and minimal, is experiential – it lightly cloaks the listener and invites them into an inner circle. Roxanne and her bandmates gave that feeling weight and atmosphere with their hour-long masterclass on this occasion.
Given that the stage was in the middle of the room, I’m still not sure how Roxanne and bassist Nico Leibman (otherwise known as Harmony Index) seemed to suddenly appear on it without walking from any back room – at least that I could see. But it was a perfect introduction to a set that was filled with little miracles, beginning with the opening “The Age Of Innocence”. For this song, the two figures’ backs were towards me, which meant I was more focused on the vaporous delicacy of the piece and allowed me to be transported to a weightless between-states existence.
Roxanne then moved to the piano and was facing our way – a subtle piece of acknowledgement of everyone in the room. “Berceuse in A-flat Minor, Op. 45” lapped at our feet like gentle waves on a shore, until Leibman’s bass made a softly swelling introduction, suddenly making us realise we’d drifted dreamily into deeper waters than we’d realised. For the following “Keepsake”, Leibman donned headphones to keep a close ear on Roxanne’s crystalline piano and featherlight vocals, but as she swayed gently and passionately along she seemed just as wrapt as any of the audience members around.
Around the mid-point of the set, drummer Jem Doulton joined to make a trio that sifted through different dimensions. His subtle but essential work on “Untitled II” added not only rhythm but atmosphere, while he brought more of a chug to the sample-imbued and quietly fiery “Camille”.
The star, however, remained Roxanne, as she toured us through the majority of her stunning recent album Poem 1. While she would never be the kind to seize the spotlight, she is also unafraid to stand up within it and show her talents. On this occasion that was perhaps best exemplified by “One Shall Sleep”, where she essentially spoke her way through a field of aural flowers, her face directly in the spotlight’s tendrils – and everyone else in a simply trance like state, following her wherever she might tell us to go.
Or perhaps it was “Atonement”, Poem 1’s breathtaking closer brought to impossibly shimmering life by the trio on stage. Doulton’s once again perfectly-light percussion and Liebman’s glistening globules of bass and heart-shaped backing vocals all perfectly set the canvas for Roxanne’s diaphanous and emotive vocal work, which settled on the audience like clouds of falling blossom.
Roxanne posted on her social media after the show that she had been shaken by performing to an attentive, adoring sell-out crowd in London. However, for those of us on the other side, the reaction was the opposite – after spending an hour in her resonance, a sense of stillness and inner peace seemed to take over.
