Descansos, past is moody, intimate “in memoriam” music featuring double bass amid a choir of nine cellos led by new-music-champion cellist Erika Duke-Kirkpatrick. A 15-minute...

Descansos, past is moody, intimate “in memoriam” music featuring double bass amid a choir of nine cellos led by new-music-champion cellist Erika Duke-Kirkpatrick. A 15-minute CD EP/single. “Lush bleakness that evokes the windswept open spaces of the American West...brooding lyricism...music that seems to linger even after the recording has ended.” [John Schaefer, WNYC, New Sounds] “A work of noble mourning.... playing that is full-bodied and unerringly precise, the string textures glow warmly.” [Int’l Record Review] “Immediately appealing…. If Samuel Barber had been born a half century later as a forward-looking resident of the West Coast, his Adagio for Strings might have sounded a lot like Jim Fox’s Descansos, past.” [ClassicalNet] “Aural poetry, like an inscription on a tombstone to be read with a faint smile instead of tear-stained eyes.” [Paris Transatlantic] “Easily the most beautiful thing I heard all week, Fox’s haunting memorial for his friend, composer/performer John Kuhlman…is deep on so many levels…. You won't want to listen to anything for a while after you've heard this.” [Frank J. Oteri, NewMusicBox (American Music Center)] “The best artists sometimes give you what you didn’t know you wanted because you never heard it like this. Jim Fox and his Descansos, past does that…. It is heartrendingly beautiful music, a dirge with a profound feeling of loss…. Ravishing chamber music! Listen to this one! [Gapplegate Classical-Modern Music Review] “Descansos, past is an utterly beautiful, aching work…. Fox has a remarkable ability to balance darkness and light in his music; what seems at first a state of calm questioning might, as this work unfolds, open up the listener to a deeper sense of the awe and mystery at the heart of sound and thought.” [Dusted magazine ("most memorable recordings of 2005")]