Hallow Ground – 21st December 2025
Christopher Nosnibor
Ivan Pavlov has been releasing music as COH since circa 1997, and in the last twenty-eight years has amassed an immense catalogue which includes some thirty-six albums, often on respected experimental / avant-garde labels like Editions Mego and Raster-Noton. This body of work features a fair number of collaborations. This is his first with ‘the mysterious’ Wladimir Schall, who is no stranger to performing radically overhauled cover versions, not least of all his 2020 release on an endlessly looping cassette with his take on Satie’s Vexations. Suffice it to say, then, that none of the seven pieces on here could be described as ‘straight’ covers. Then again, given the nature of the selected material, how would one go about performing a ‘straight’ cover, and what would be the point, precisely?
As the accompanying notes explain, ‘the two multi-media artists are not content with the mere reinterpretation of their source material, but strive to reimagine it. According to them, the seven pieces on Covers were conceived as “a series of manoeuvres with an ambition to expose the machinery of Music in detail and with utter honesty, without making up for the faults of its traditional instruments or of the compositions themselves.”’
Perhaps the best known and most easily recognisable of the compositions is ‘Merry Christmas Mr Erik’, which opens the album by reworking Ryuichi Sakamoto’s ‘Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence’ as a sparse, almost jazzy work where it’s acoustic guitar which leads before the arrival of piano, which remains at a respectful distance. Not long after, we’re transported into a sparse, foggy trip of piano-led ambience. Perhaps one of the most audacious ‘covers’ is Soii Blanc’, an original COH composition which appeared on IIRON in 2011 – the album which was, in fact, my introduction to the world of COH. This version transforms the sparse electronic piece where experimental synth music meets early industrial grind into a soft piano work that’s as light as a feather but also mysteriously atmospheric through its subtle dissonances which grow with ringing, buzzing tones which gradually disrupt the delicate ripples with digital discord, creating the effect of some form of mechanical breakdown. Then again, ‘Snowflakes’ sees the pair ‘cover’ a ‘non-existent’ original’. It’s evocative: close your eyes and you may well visualise snowfall in your mind’s eye – but then glitches and scrapes cut through the reverie. In the main, it’s subtle, but enough to be disconcerting.
While there’s no clear or specific arc to the album, there is a sense that as it progresses, digital decay and interference gradually erode the graceful atmospheres conjured by piano and acoustic instruments alone – and by the arrival of the final piece, the brief bookend that is ‘Starost ne Radost’ – or ‘Старость не радость’ (joy and sadness), the juxtaposition of scratchy in the vintage sense and scratchy in the ersatz, manipulated digital sense comes to share a meeting and sensation.
AA
Aural Aggravation 