official Covenant Forum

Quoted

One of electronic music's most unpredictable artists turns to the eternal dark forces of metal for inspiration on 'IIron'. Occurring 10 years after the original 'Iron' on his own Wavetrap label, Ivan Pavlov has returned to his illicitly made Soviet-era metal recordings, alloying them with recent guitar tracks made at York University's Music Research centre and a dash of his cold, black humour to bend the genre into fascinatingly malleable and reactive shapes. Riffs are looped and sliced into jabbing slabs of force whose impact is somewhat twisted out of context when arranged with skanking folk dance pulse rhythms on 'Slowup (Quadrate Fur Jah)' or blunted with a barrage of glancing electronics and idiosyncratic melodic torsion in 'Fists Of Glory'. On 'All Lights Are Fire' the guitars timbre is almost indiscernible and pushed to the background only to leap forth at unexpected junctures, making its most impressive appearance in this fashion on the eccentric techno/metal jam 'Satsugali', but when he uses them in accordance with the scriptures of metal, albeit dislocated and manipulated on the nine minute 'War End War' epic, they're alternately terrifying and comical. Most of all, this album is about the nuances of Pavlov's unquestioned compositional skill and the deadly visceral dynamic he applies to it, all with the most suggestive electronic winks and sardonic devil fingers.