vanity productions: only the grains of love remain

As the nom de plume of Posh Isolation's co-founder Christian Stadsgaard, there is a deeply private, yet fiercely empathic quality to Only The Grains Of Love Remain. Pirouetting between his collaborative work with Loke Rahbek as Damien Dubrovnik, as well as The Empire Line with Varg, and Iron Sight, to name just Stadsgaard's most recent activity, the inwardness reserved for Vanity Productions is perhaps a necessary step. That the emotive experimentation should generate such a touching soliloquy is an arresting watermark, presenting Only The Grains Of Love Remain as the most eloquent work of the project to date. Following on from Mardini (2016), Only The Grains Of Love Remain takes a delicate and determined route through the terrain of Vanity Productions. Mapped with musique concrète's metrics, there is an uneasy sensation between guilty revulsion and cosmic longing captured in the moments of harmony. Dissolving these small bursts of clarity-through-agony is however not a matter of exploring intensity with volume, or other such devices and motifs. With an almost bitter precision, Stadsgaard continually spikes the grounding compositional elements with unnervingly distant patterns of crisp synthetic alloys. Where weighted, gothic passages are undone into peaceful plateaux, and there is a sense of coveted respite from the body's adrenal chemistry. Temporality is suspended, enough to solicit reflection. As the work coasts the mesh of decision/indecision, witness/actor, falling/flying, however it strikes, one gets the sense that the after-image of noise being articulated is in the end giving way to a greater cathartic broadcast that Only The Grains Of Love Remain documents: life, love, and thought.