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Review by Bill Binkelman Seldom does an album's accompanying artwork (in this case, the back cover of the digipack) so perfectly capture the essence of the music contained within. Rick Cox's Fade is a single twenty-five minute tone poem that paints a muted, somber and evocative portrait of fading light, shadows, and emotional ambiguity, manifested through sparse melancholic minimalism by Cox (on electric guitar, sometimes heavily processed), Thomas Newman (discretely applied piano) and Peter Freeman (bass and signal processors). If one imagined either Tim Story's music stripped of its neo-chamber classical romanticism as well as its repetitive musical phrase motifs, or recent recordings by Dwight Ashley but with less abstraction and more of a minimalist approach, one would be on the right track. Haunting without being the least bit pretentious or precious, Fade slowly seeps into your consciousness in the same way that one is vaguely aware of a growing darkness or a subtle change in the humidity as a storm approaches. Labeling this EP "ambient," while one hundred percent accurate (in that it is music that colors a room without calling attention to itself) is doing it an injustice, for when listened to directly, there is such a high degree of intelligence and care injected into the recording that ignoring it, while possible, is to miss out on the EP's strengths. This is transportive music which gently nudges the impressionable listener into the dreary fog-shrouded cityscape that graces the back cover of the digipack. While there are three vague "movements" on the EP (but only one time cue), the composition plays through as a cohesive whole. Cox's wavery guitar textures break apart and then coalesce around the bare piano notes with an undercurrent of subtle electronics supplying enough additional coloring to impart a shade of mystery. I hesitate to call this CD "dark." I found it quite beautiful and not the least bit disturbing. Fade is the soundtrack to a cold November afternoon, but not the normal softly glowing nostalgia of crisp autumn and falling leaves. Instead, the music evokes memories of impending barren emptiness and the inevitability of the approaching cruelty of winter, yet infused with a palpable sense of comfort since this is simply nature cycling through the years as has always been the case. Whether you will have the same reaction to this music as I did, I wholeheartedly recommend Fade, one of several EPs on the Cold Blue Music label which I will be reviewing this issue. |
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