COH reissues ‘Iron’ on vinyl for the first time through We Are Busy Bodies
COH reissues “Iron” on 30 October 2026 through We Are Busy Bodies, remastered and pressed on vinyl for the first time in an edition of 500.
COH reissues “Iron” on 30 October 2026 through the Toronto label We Are Busy Bodies, remastered and pressed on vinyl for the first time in its 26-year history. The album, written and recorded by Ivan Pavlov between May 1999 and May 2000, first appeared in 2000 as a limited CD on the Swedish label Wavetrap. The new edition runs to 500 black 12-inch copies alongside a 24-bit digital release, both open for pre-order.
“Iron” grew out of Pavlov’s teenage years in the Soviet Union and the record-exchanging network that carried Western heavy metal through it. He was fourteen when his grandmother brought him a six-string guitar and Iron Maiden’s “Running Free” convinced him that he and his friends could play that music too; they rehearsed in a Soviet youth club on whatever gear was available. Several of the album titles carry that history forward. “Rubbing Free” points back at the Iron Maiden song, while “For Whom The Dell Falls” and “Love Mites” nod to Metallica and Judas Priest. Trading records at the time could mean running from the police, losing the records and facing disciplinary consequences; as a DJ, Pavlov drew up lists of invented song titles for his school principal to approve before a dance.
“It was an exciting time. There was enthusiasm; there was a community living on music,” Pavlov stated. “There’s a name in the album credits, Vadim ‘Mark’ Kosolapov, he was the person who introduced me to that community back in the day.”
What COH does with heavy metal on ‘Iron’
The record is not a metal album. Pavlov describes it as an attempt to isolate one narrow band of the genre’s sound and discard everything around it.
“Iron could be seen as a symbolic tribute to the time when I was young, fearless, obsessed with forbidden music,” he explained. “But aesthetically, I was approaching that music as an adult, and with interest and certain experience in electronic sound. What interested me was a particular range of mid-frequencies, the grain of the distorted guitar sound. On IRON, I was trying to isolate that grain, stripping away the rest – vocals, drums, cymbals, bass – to get a refined spectral slice of what I realize I love most about heavy metal. So, while emotionally the record looks back at youth and the excitement around the forbidden; sonically, it’s an attempt to express what I find the essence of the sound on the records we exchanged.”
The cover applies the same logic to an image. While working with the Nizhny Novgorod artists Galina Myznikova and Sergey Provorov on a film scored with his music, Pavlov came across a series by Provorov made by pressing a hot iron onto paper laid over textured metal, the heat burning through and leaving the structure beneath visible.
“This technique relates to frottage, introduced by Max Ernst, where rubbing a charcoal or pencil reveals the structure beneath a sheet of paper you rub on,” he said. “On IRON, I was doing something similar with sound, extracting only one core texture from the whole spectrum of heavy metal. Sergey’s work felt resonant, with its similar approach, in visual terms. Of course, the double meaning of the word ‘iron’ – both the metal and the household tool used to make the artwork – appealed to me as well. There is definitely some irony in it!”
‘Iron’ tracklist and credits
The reissue keeps all eight original pieces but resequences the middle of the record: “Annum Per Annum [Pärt 2]”, “East.er.Okay.Hell”, “Love Mites”, “Now! [4’19” into 2000]”, “Waltz Nuevo No. 2”, “For Whom The Dell Falls”, “Rubbing Free” and “Spiegel I’m Spiegel”. “For Whom The Dell Falls” streams now on Bandcamp; the remaining tracks unlock on release.
All music is by Pavlov, with digital assistance credited to a-lisa. Sergey Provorov supplied the hot-iron cover art, East End Mastering handled the remaster and Steve Lewin carried out the artwork restoration. The 2000 CD came in a gatefold sleeve, with 27 copies issued alongside an exclusive print and a personalised certificate. No official video accompanies the reissue.
About COH
COH is the recording name of Ivan Pavlov, a Russian-born sound artist and engineer who has lived in Sweden since 1995 and adopted the alias after moving there; it reads identically in Cyrillic and Latin script and means sleep or dream in Russian. He has also worked as Frankie Gothard. His first album under the name, “In Spaces Between”, appeared self-released in 1997, followed by “Enter Tinnitus” on Rastermusic in 1998 and the CDr “Grain” in 1999.
The year 2000 was his densest: “Love Uncut” on Eskaton, “Iron” on Wavetrap and “Mask Of Birth” on Raster-Noton, the Chemnitz label with which he kept a long association. “Hide & Seek” followed on Falsch in 2001, then “Москве” and “Seasons” in 2002 and “Netmörk” on Source Research the same year. “0397 Post-Pop” came out on Mego in 2005, “Above Air” on Eskaton in 2006, “Strings” on Raster-Noton in 2007 and “CoH Plays Cosey”, built around material by Cosey Fanni Tutti, on the same label in 2008. Editions Mego then issued “IIRON” in 2011, a direct companion to the album now being reissued, followed by “RETRO-2038” in 2013, “TO BEAT” in 2014 and “Music Vol.” in 2016. “CoH Plays Everall” appeared on Hallow Ground in 2017, “Doma” on :retortae: in 2018 and “20:20 Cantata Ariosa” on Aika Recordings in 2020.
Alongside his own records, Pavlov has worked with Coil, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Annie Anxiety and Richard Chartier. In 2007 he launched Soisong with Peter Christopherson of Coil and Throbbing Gristle; Christopherson died in 2010, and Pavlov later mixed the pair’s unfinished Bangkok material. We Are Busy Bodies, the Toronto label handling this reissue, was founded in 2005 by Eric Warner and has issued more than 200 releases, many of them archival. “Iron” is the first COH album it has taken on.
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