CoH - Iron

If anybody had told me before this album came out that a minimal and to-that-point ambient-ish artist was going to do an electronic homage to heavy metal music, I would have been suspicious that Mr. Pavlov had been hanging out too much with Alec Empire, Liam Howlett, etc. As it turns out, CoH combines his personal style (a looping counterpoint similar to Ryoji Ikeda and, to some extent, early Frank Bretschneider) with the gnarliest knobs on whatever synths or plugins he keeps in his back pocket.

I don't know how many instruments he uses on this album, but the effect is unifying in the way the early minimalists used combinatorial orchestration to generate singular statements of texture and rhythm you could play for your most Hessian of buddies. In immersing himself in the language of heavy metal, Ivan incorporates something of both distortion and riffing in these tracks that do nothing if not beg the listener to turn it up, "Freedom Rock" style. That it's minimal music makes no difference to your headbanging, the Quaalude Thunder and guitar solos will magically appear in your imagination, if you want them.