In three connected sections, Rick Cox's Fade offers a series of harmonic “moments” of various densities and complexities and timbres and lengths. Throughout the work, these moments, like elements in a mobile, are in a constant state of changing perspective.

Rick Cox is a composer and skilled multi-instrumentalist whom guitarist/composer Ry Cooder called “the hidden master of the crepuscular and the diaphanous.” Cox was an early explorer/developer of “prepared electric guitar” techniques His concert pieces, which often employ himself (electric guitar, woodwinds, and/or electronics) in the company of other instrumentalists, have been performed throughout the U.S. and recorded on the Cold Blue , Grenadilla, Advance, and Raptoria Caam labels. British music publication The Wire wrote of Cox’s often lush and beautiful soundscapes for electric guitar and other instruments: “His enveloping harmonies are less innocent than they first appear. Prettiness with a tough core.”

“From its first inquisitive augmented chord, Rick Cox’s Fade is hard to pin down…. Edges and contours are all smoothed away, the music insinuating much more than it says…. But Cox’s elusiveness soon becomes subtlety, and I came to admire his way of opening up spaces and filling them—patiently, softly—with music. . . . The word ‘ambient’ has served too long—or so Fade seems to say—as a catchall for quiet and dominantly electronic music of an impressionist bent…. Cox has more in common with, say, the classical Japanese shakuhachi repertory than he does with Eno…. The piece is a relaxing and most enjoyable 25 minutes, a gentle aural makeover. —Arved Ashby, Gramophone

“On his Fade CD, guitarist Rick Cox creates night music filled with echoes and murmurs, in the shape of a single piece stretching out into complete silence.” — Gérard Nicollet, Octopus (France)