Rick Cox

This CD brings together six of Rick Cox’s elegantly sparse, dark, sensuous, vaguely desolate soundscapes in which emotions seem to bubble just below cool surfaces (tracing a history of his work from 1990 through 2001). Most of these pieces display Cox’s subtle, idiosyncratic electric guitar playing techniques, which sometimes employ preparations placed amid the strings (similar to those utilized in prepared piano works) and the use of such objects as sponges and brushes and glass lab slides to set the instrument’s strings in motion. (Cox has been developing these techniques since the early 1970s.) These works also highlight Cox’s ear for unusual and interesting harmonies.

All the While Toward Us, for pedal steel guitar and electric guitar, is a slow, chorale-like piece that gracefully blends the harmonic worlds of perhaps Bill Evans and Samuel Barber.

Maria Falling Away, for electric guitar and clarinet, explores dark, prepared-guitar sonorities and an intimately recorded clarinet line in the context of a traditional song form.

Beige 2, for electric guitar, alto saxophone, and piano, is a two-part piece in which the development precedes the exposition.

The Years in Streams is a through-composed work that seems almost programmatic as it drifts through rich, complex harmonic fields that feel like segments of a mysterious travelogue. It is scored for electric guitar (utilizing non-traditional playing techniques) and baritone electric guitar, under which floats a single contra-alto clarinet tone.

Long Distance, for electric guitar, sampler, and trumpet, is a chord-voicing study that rides atop a casual, infectious rhythmic stream. Weaving through the work is a semi-improvisational trumpet line.

All the While Toward Us II, for electric guitar, is a re-scoring of the chorale-like piece that opens the CD. Here, in a thinner scoring, it serves as the CD’s coda.

Rick Cox is a Los Angeles-based composer and multi-instrumentalist. As a featured performer (woodwinds, guitar, and sampler), he can be heard on such popular film scores as The Shawshank Redemption, The Horse Whisperer, and American Beauty (scores by Thomas Newman) and on recent recordings by jazz/new-music trumpeter Jon Hassell. He has also collaborated with guitarist/composer Ry Cooder, arranging, composing and performing on the film scores Last Man Standing and Wim Wenders’ End of Violence. Cox’s own scores include Inside Monkey Zetterland and Corrina, Corrina. He regularly performs in the Los Angeles area with new music, avant-rock, and jazz-oriented ensembles. His concert pieces have been commissioned and performed by chamber ensembles and soloists throughout the U.S. and recorded on the Grenadilla, Advance, Raptoria Caam, and Cold Blue labels.

“Gently undulating melodies are held in soft focus, without becoming cloying; his enveloping harmonies are less innocent than they first appear. Prettiness with a tough core.” —The Wire magazine

“Rick is a hidden master of the crepuscular and the diaphanous.” —Ry Cooder