"Good Music Should Be Hard to Find": CoH’s Ivan Pavlov on the Release of IRON on Vinyl, Heavy Metal, and Soviet Censors

Before Ivan Pavlov became an established figure known in experimental music as CoH and formed Soisong with Peter Christopherson, he was a teenage heavy-metal obsessive growing up in the late Soviet Union. 

At school parties, he could play forbidden music as long as the principal approved his playlist. To get around the rules, he invented song titles like “Morning Sunshine” and “Colours of the Rainbow,” even making up band names to keep the list looking harmless.  Once the list was stamped, however, Pavlov could play whatever he wanted. His early musical life revolved around exchanging records across the city and rehearsing with classmates on battered Soviet guitars. At fourteen, inspired by Iron Maiden, he picked up a guitar and decided that he and his friends could play that kind of music, too. 

For many people, especially younger listeners, that might sound wild, but alternative music from the West was forbidden in the USSR. Finding it required real effort and often entailed taking dangerous risks. Although I was born near the end of the Soviet era and it was long gone by the time I came of age to discover alternative music, I remember reading and hearing stories just like Ivan’s. This is part of the reason why it is so compelling to feature him on Tape Wounds today and share these anecdotes with you. When music isn't handed to you on a plate, but you have to hunt for it, bend the rules or improvise with whatever instrument is to hand, it creates a completely different relationship with sound. It is this friction that stays with you, sparking a hunger to continue experimenting and pushing boundaries, even decades later.

Pavlov's formative years eventually became the inspiration for his 2000 album IRON, which is now being released on vinyl for the first time through We Are Busy Bodies. If you're unfamiliar with IRON, it's less a heavy-metal record than an electronic study of what makes heavy metal sound the way it does. For Pavlov, it's a way of capturing the emotional essence of his teenage obsession with bands like Iron Maiden, Metallica and Judas Priest. He strips the music back to what he calls the "grain" of distorted guitar, and transforms it into abstract electronic compositions. The result captures the emotional impact of those influences without resorting to the familiar signatures of the genre: aggressive vocals, crashing cymbals and virtuoso guitar solos.

Before the vinyl release of IRON, I caught up with Ivan to look back at the underground record-trading networks of his youth, the peculiar freedoms of making music under Soviet authority, and the transition from teenage metalhead to experimental electronic composer. We also talked about the value of effort in discovering music, the friendship and creative encouragement he found in Balance and Christopherson, and the curiosity that continues to drive his work. 

I feel I have enough courage to try anything, and I'm always ready to put in a great deal of effort, hopefully encouraging some effort from the few who care to follow my work. Have you listened to Julio Ecclesiast yet? :)

Before the underground music and the experiments with sound, what was music like in your childhood home?

My father was very musical; he played the trumpet and piano. I started taking piano lessons at the age of five. He was also very interested in technology, and we had various tape recorders at home. My father used to record songs from the radio and bring home vinyl records, so yes, you could say my childhood was quite musical overall. :)

My earliest musical memory is Mireille Mathieu’s “Ciao Bambino Sorry.” I must have been around nine or ten years old. Then there was Boney M’s Nightflight to Venus, which came my way through my uncle, who brought the vinyl from East Germany.

You were fourteen when Iron Maiden’s “Running Free” inspired you to pick up a guitar and start a band. Do you remember the first time you heard that song, and what was it about heavy metal that spoke to you so strongly?

It wasn't specifically that song. I remember getting a tape containing two Iron Maiden albums: their debut and the 1982 album The Number of the Beast. Having played piano for a number of years and only just started playing guitar, I realised how elaborate the arrangements were. But “Running Free” seemed like a simple song, and I thought we should be able to play something like that. :)

As for why heavy metal appealed to a Soviet teenager, first of all, it was forbidden fruit, as this kind of music wasn't particularly welcome in the USSR. The teenage urge for generational rebellion was perfectly satisfied by the thrill of running away from the police with illegal records. On top of that, heavy metal carries just the right amount of aggression to match the hormonal changes of adolescence. How could a teenage boy anywhere in the world not listen to heavy metal? :)

Photo Credit: Carl Abrahamsson

Discovering Western music in the late Soviet era meant relying on a network of people who exchanged records, tapes and information. How did you first find your way into that community, and what did you have to do to get hold of music that was difficult to access?

At school, I had a couple of friends with older brothers and tape recorders at home. They would bring over tapes for me to listen to, and I would copy them, gradually building up my own collection. At some point, I met an older, cool guy from school known as “Mark.” He's mentioned in the liner notes of IRON.

Mark was one of the key figures in the local heavy metal scene. He introduced my friends and me to the actual black market. We pooled enough money to buy one new LP, and from there, things spiralled out of control. For a couple of years, we exchanged LPs across the city almost every day.

The story of submitting fake song-title lists to your school principal so he would approve your DJ sets for school dances is fantastic. Do you remember any of those hilarious fake titles, and how did you manage to slip heavy or forbidden sounds past authority figures back then?

I still have one of those lists somewhere. The imaginary songs had silly titles like “Morning Sunshine” or “Colours of the Rainbow.” I also made up band names to make sure nothing looked suspicious. Among the fake entries, I included a few real songs by Soviet performers to make the list look credible.

Funny enough, one day a Soviet song called “Cats” was rejected as suspicious because of its title. But once the list had been approved and stamped by the principal, I could play anything that evening. No officials would bother checking the music or what the songs were about.

You’ve talked about running from the police with records under your arm and playing forbidden music with your band. This might sound surreal to a generation that streams everything instantly. When you look at how young people discover and engage with subcultures today, what feels lost—or gained—now that music is no longer something you have to hide or physically fight for?

I feel that our understanding of value has been changing over the decades. The idea that value is measured by the effort you or someone else has put into something is becoming increasingly obscure. The way I grew up has left me firmly convinced that good music should be hard to find, whether that means running from the police with the records you love or digging through playlists in search of something that resonates with you.

Either way, I believe that when the musician's effort is matched by the listener's effort, it helps the listener appreciate the music more, approach it with genuine attention and ultimately value it.

At the same time, music isn't just an art form; it's also a market. If music is difficult to access, the musician might not have enough money to put food on the table. For most of my career, I've had a job that pays the bills, so I've felt completely free to record whatever music I wanted, without thinking about audience numbers or worrying about whether it would sell.

You and your friends eventually rehearsed in a Soviet youth club with whatever equipment you could find. What do you remember about those first rehearsals—the people, the instruments, the sound you were trying to achieve? And what did that community give you beyond the music itself?

My classmates and I just wanted to play something hard and heavy. The equipment wasn't really suited to it. We had a lousy drum kit and a couple of old Soviet guitars that made plenty of noise even when nobody was playing them. :)

It didn't even matter that we couldn't play gigs or get the sound we wanted. We were just happy to meet a couple of times a week and lose ourselves in the music, the discussions and the fun. It was a place where we felt we could do something we genuinely wanted to do.

IRON grew out of those teenage experiences, but instead of recreating heavy metal, you stripped it down to what you describe as the “grain” of distorted guitar, particularly its midrange frequencies. When you began making the album, how did you arrive at the idea of extracting that quality rather than reproducing the music you loved?

Well, it has to be interesting, and it also has to be a challenge for me to try something new. Reproducing heavy metal was a challenge when I was a teenager. I've grown up since then, and my ears have heard a lot more music. On top of that, I've studied acoustics, developed interests in art, cinema and philosophy, and met other musicians. So, when recording IRON, I was looking back at my teenage passion from the perspective of what I had learned and what I was now capable of doing.

You use a lot of playful irony in your track titles to re-examine your teenage metal influences. But beneath that cheeky surface, what were you fundamentally trying to capture from those original records when translating them into electronic music?

In a way, IRON is a study of the particular kind of sound that once fascinated me. I wanted to isolate the essence that triggers the same emotional response in me as it did when I was a teenager, but without the obvious genre gimmicks, such as aggressive vocals, crashing cymbals and virtuoso guitar solos.

I used to play guitar, so I was trying to refine the aesthetics of dirty guitar riffs into rhythmic patterns, focusing on the effects of distortion itself. It was a playful form of research, hence the cheekiness of the titles.

There is a fascinating parallel between the music and the album artwork, which uses heat from an iron to reveal the textures of objects beneath a sheet of paper. How did Sergey Provorov’s technique connect with your own approach to sound?

I discovered Sergey's art by accident, after the album had already been finished and the title decided. Using a hot iron on paper is related to an old graphic technique called frottage. You place a textured object beneath a sheet of paper and rub the paper with charcoal or a pencil to reveal the texture. We used to do this with coins when we were kids.

IRON uses a similar concept in sound: leaving out most of the unnecessary material and extracting only the essential texture. So, when I saw Sergey's iron works, the connection immediately clicked for me.

IRON was originally released in 2000 and is now receiving its first vinyl edition, remastered for the reissue. More than a quarter-century later, how do you hear the album today?

It brought back memories of that time and made me smile a few times. The record sounds focused; it doesn't compromise, and it delivers the essence. I like it. It's entertaining in a rather peculiar way.

You moved from Russia to Sweden, studied radiophysics and acoustics, and developed CoH as a project built around experimental electronic sound. How did that transition change your musical life? How did your scientific education give you a different way of thinking about sound?

Probably the most valuable thing I gained from my acoustic studies was learning to think about sound in graphic terms, both as a waveform and as a spectrum. When I first saw Panasonic perform live in Stockholm in 1996, if I remember correctly, and project live waveforms onto a screen, it really resonated with me. I was surprised to see something at a concert that I had previously encountered in university labs. Perhaps that also encouraged me to pursue music in a direction where I've always been more interested in creating waveforms than in using instruments.

Photo Credit: John Balance

You became one of the relatively few artists released on Eskaton, the label associated with Coil, and your work brought you into close contact with John Balance and Peter Christopherson. How did that relationship begin, and what was it like to find yourself part of a community whose approach to experimental music had already meant so much to you?

I met Balance and Sleazy back in 1997 through a mutual friend, John Everall. We quickly discovered shared interests, including sound and science in general. They were both very curious and knowledgeable, and every phone conversation or time spent together felt like an important event in itself.

Over the years, we became good friends, and they were very supportive of my work. In fact, even before I had released any music, Balance offered to put out a CoH album on their label after hearing my first sketches. To me, this was an endorsement I couldn't even have dreamed of, as I was still fumbling in the dark, trying to work out what I could make as “music.” I think that unexpected, unconditional support from the people who had inspired me most gave me confidence for many years to come.

You and Peter Christopherson formed Soisong after knowing each other for years. You’ve described the creative exchange between you as something almost intuitive, with ideas being understood and transformed before they were fully articulated. What did working with Peter bring out in you that might not have emerged in your solo work? And what has it been like to revisit the music and memories you made together since his death?

Above all, working with Peter taught me courage: the courage to follow an idea through to its full realisation, no matter how crazy, ridiculous or expensive it might seem at first. I was already quite brave, but every now and then I would reject things that seemed too outrageous. Soisong taught me not to.

As for working on the Soisong book and going through the archives, it felt warm, even uplifting. It was like bathing in the sunny bliss of Bangkok, where Peter and I were full of enthusiasm, mutual encouragement and humour, with no limitations.

Over the course of your career, you’ve moved between heavy metal, abstract electronics, sound art and collaborations with artists working in very different fields. Is there a particular idea or question that connects all these projects for you, even when the music sounds completely different? And when you think back to the teenager who first heard Iron Maiden in the Soviet Union, what part of that person is still present in the music you make today?

Just as in the Soviet Union, today I'm mostly driven by curiosity. Back then, I was curious about music made by others. Now I'm looking for something I haven't done before, if only to see whether I can pull it off.

I feel I have enough courage to try anything, and I'm always ready to put in a great deal of effort, hopefully encouraging some effort from the few who care to follow my work. Have you listened to Julio Ecclesiast yet? :)