Ana Roxanne @ The Glad Cafe, Glasgow, 26 Mar

Openers Chantal Michelle and Grace Villamil are a solid start. Amid waves of bass and a fidgety synth approximation of the cicadas that hover about so much ambience, they growl to life. As Michelle drifts between knobs and blows into the mic, while Villamil is head down, staring steadfast at the screen like a hacker in a 90s film, the piece unfurls gently, growing at a steady, glacial pace. The music really starts to impact as it peaks in intensity, when the bass begins to snarl and the synths become more fraught. It begins to sound like the dying flails of some subterranean behemoth, squirming its last gasps beneath the dirt. The piece unfortunately begins to run on fumes a little after that, but it’s a strong opening set from the pair.

Then comes the headliner, and the stark realisation that sometimes you’re truly made to rethink things. Not about Ana Roxanne, her slim volume of work is one of the most consistently beautiful of the past few years, but rather gigs in general. What I’ve always craved in a live performance is some form of tension, be it people at the edges of their limited technical dexterity, someone battling their shyness, or them simply pushing through their naked disdain towards the audience. But Roxanne blows all of this out of the water. There is not for a second even the vaguest hint that she will be anything less than sublime. Never mind a missed vocal note, there isn’t a moment in which she doesn’t hold your heart in her palm and inflate it with yearning and quietly desperate hope.

Her songs live, largely constructed from the slightest ripple of a bass riff, a touch of synth, a balm of a looped vocal drone and her gorgeous voice, become so much more than on record. Far from the ambient tag she often has stuck to her, they are more like torch songs stretched until barely recognisable, a kind of Julie London operating in some abstract, otherworldly plain. The quietest of quiet storm. The pokey little rhythm at the base of Camille are the only drums of the evening, and shake things just enough to show she is equally adept snaking her voice through the hisses of drum machine as she is at spreading it across a vast expanse of noise.

It’s a truly sublime set, short, but emotionally elevating, beginning at a point of luminescent beauty and never wavering for a second. The kind of gig you can only wander the streets in a daze after.