Because of a Flower

Editors’ Notes If bioluminescence could assume a musical form, it might sound like Ana Roxanne’s Because of a Flower. On the Los Angeles-based electronic musician’s second album, dream pop and ambient swirl together, glowing as they drift; in “Venus,” the gentle sound of lapping waves even accompanies her spoken-word ruminations on the nature of liquids, keyboards twinkling like a galaxy reflected in the tide. She has a minimalist’s sense of economy: Most of her music is made of little more than synthesizer and her own multi-tracked and harmonized voice. But her influences are vast, taking in medieval European choral music (“A Study in Vastness”), slowcore (“Suite Pour L’invisible”), new age (“- - -”), trip-hop (“Camille”), and even Hindustani singing (“Venus”). And though the mood is often melancholy, it is never despondent; grief and hope exist in equal measure. As she sings in the spare, searching “Suite Pour L’invisible,” “Endless sorrow, endless joy, endless sorrow/I’ll hold your joy/I’ll hold your pain.”