The one thing that you cannot expect from an album called »Covers« by electronic music polymath Ivan Pavlov a.k.a. CoH and the mysterious Wladimir Schall is a simple covers album, though both Pavlov and Schall have paid tribute to their favourites before. The former has recorded an album dedicated to the late John Everall, released in 2017 through Hallow Ground as »CoH Plays Everall,« and the latter has put out an endlessly looping cassette in 2020 with his take on Satie’s »Vexations.« Much like on these records, 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.«

Pavlov and Schall’s strategy is one of juxtaposition and recontextualisation. Taking compositions performed on the piano as a starting point, they let the unfamiliar emerge from all-too familiar tunes and sounds through digital manipulation and electronic processing. »Covers« includes two pieces that contrast the music of Satie and Ryūichi Sakamoto to let these quiet radicals find common ground in unsuspected ways. Another one turns a four-note motive by Sergei Rachmaninoff into a dense soundscape, while two pieces are inspired by different USSR cartoons, the 1978 animated short-film »Контакт« and the »Ну, погоди!« series. CoH’s »Soii Noir« from 2011’s »IIRON« is reworked through the lens of Morton Feldman, and with »Snowflakes,« the pair covers a »non-existent original« in the spirit of Immanuel Kant’s idea that music and laughter do not need words to convey their meaning.

The common thread that connects these calm, evocative reimaginations is the ambiguity of nostalgia; a sense of »Старость не радость« as the last piece’s title puts it: joy and sadness. »Covers« is not a usual covers album, but a radical interrogation of the function and failings of memory presented in musical form.