There are albums that revisit the past. And then there are albums that take the past apart with a jeweller’s screwdriver, lay its gears on a velvet cloth, and ask: "so, how exactly does this thing tick?"

With "Covers", released by Hallow Ground (H2509) on December 21st, 2025, CoH and Wladimir Schall offer not a tribute record, not a nostalgic mixtape, but something closer to a philosophical experiment pressed on vinyl.

Ivan Pavlov - known for decades as CoH, a restless explorer of digital signal, conceptual rigor and elegant reduction - has long treated sound as both sculpture and proposition. His earlier detours into homage (including his austere engagement with John Everall) already suggested that influence for him is less about admiration and more about interrogation. Schall, equally elusive, previously stretched Erik Satie’s "Vexations" into a looping temporal labyrinth. Neither artist is interested in faithful reproduction. They are interested in exposure.
And here, exposure is the operative word.

The seven pieces on "Covers" begin with piano material - but what begins as ivory soon becomes circuitry. The album opens with “Merry Xmas Mr Erik”, an oblique triangulation between Erik Satie and Ryuichi Sakamoto. It’s not a mash-up; it’s a slow dissolving of stylistic fingerprints. Satie’s dry wit and Sakamoto’s fragile lyricism are nudged into a shared acoustic twilight, where melody feels less like narrative and more like residue.

Elsewhere, a four-note cell associated with Sergei Rachmaninoff is inflated into a thick, hovering mass - like a Romantic ghost caught inside a server rack. The gesture is almost mischievous: what was once pianistic drama becomes a field of granular tension. Rachmaninoff’s emotive surge is rendered as a kind of architectural hum.

“Kohtakt” and “Okolo Kolokola” nod toward Soviet animation - particularly the 1978 short Kontakt and the cult series Nu, pogodi! - but instead of cartoonish exuberance, we encounter suspended atmospheres. Childhood memory here is neither sweet nor ironic; it is filtered, slowed, refracted. Like trying to recall a dream through frosted glass.

“SOII BLANC” revisits Pavlov’s own earlier work through the distant, hovering sensibility of Morton Feldman - that master of time stretched thin as tracing paper. The result is not imitation but displacement: tones seem to hesitate before existing, as if unsure whether memory deserves to solidify.

And then there is “Snowflakes”, a cover of something that never existed. A delicious paradox. A melody without ancestry. A wink at Immanuel Kant and the idea that meaning can emerge without semantic scaffolding. The track floats - light, crystalline, faintly absurd. It smiles without showing teeth.

If there is a unifying thread, it is the ambiguity of nostalgia. Not the syrupy variety, but the kind that tastes slightly metallic. The closing track, “Starost ne radost”, invokes a Russian proverb - old age is not joy - and the album indeed circles around that friction between tenderness and erosion. Joy and sadness are not opposites here; they are phase-shifted versions of the same waveform.

What makes "Covers" compelling is its refusal to romanticize memory. Pavlov and Schall treat recollection as unstable hardware. The “faults” of traditional instruments and compositions - those imperfections we often forgive because we love them - are not corrected. They are highlighted. Amplified. Turned into structural features.

This is electronic music with a scalpel: calm, exacting, faintly amused. It asks uncomfortable questions. What are we really hearing when we hear a “classic”? Where does authenticity reside - inside the score, the instrument, the ear, or the cultural myth wrapped around it?

As a limited art edition LP with handcrafted covers, the release reinforces the paradox: a tactile artifact dedicated to deconstructing tradition. Mastered by Andreas Lupo Lubich, the vinyl breathes with clarity; its quiet passages feel architectural rather than decorative.

In the end, "Covers" is not about covering songs. It is about uncovering mechanisms. About peeling varnish from melody. About placing memory under laboratory light and discovering that it flickers.

You don’t hum these tracks in the shower. You ponder them at 2 a.m., wondering whether the piano was ever innocent to begin with.