Fear of the Object is a collective, of sorts, who perform live together, bonded by a shared spirit of investigation into the resonant frequencies of certain objects. Some of these include traditional instruments – cello, double bass, synthesizers – while others include the more esoterically named "vibrating membrane". Leaves Never Fall in Vain is a recording of one of their concerts, chopped into three short snippets and one very long, meandering piece. While the recorded results share little in common, the happening-like conditions and methodology behind the album is reminiscent of the heady days of AMM and Musica Elettronica Viva, with their explorations of tools and media that would effectively suspend, or at least problematize, the subjectivity of each performer/participant.
Without the benefit of having been there, Leaves Never Fall in Vain is full of holes – wide open spaces and fragile moments of quiescence – and my guess is that is very much the point. The album is supported by a drone that edges forward like an organic mass, slowly incorporating the reverberations around it, feeding them back into one another, absorbing change while managing to stay pretty much the same. Apparently, a video element was also employed to turn auditory impulses into visual ones, and vice versa. Without any direct experience with, or prior knowledge of, the event, the clicks and hums could really have emerged from any input source. As such, Leaves Never Fall in Vain has to stand on its own, and it does, rather elegantly, even in a crowded field of drone and processed ambient music.
Fans of long, meandering electro-acousitc compositions that exercise tremendous instrumental restraint, will surely find something here worth returning to, if only to jibe with the lived presence of some objects that deign to speak. For
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