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Without delay terminally forbidding and inexhaustibly alluring, Nico’s The Marble Index belongs amongst these ultra-modernist works that stand except for their artwork with out regard for the implications. Like James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake or Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, it appears destined to supply an everlasting problem even to those that select to fall below its obscure spell. This newest reissue, coupled with Desertshore, its successor/sibling, demonstrates that 5 and a half many years have didn’t dent a significant element of its greatness: an obstinate refusal to clarify itself or to succumb to the sample whereby the avant-garde is absorbed and neutralised by the mainstream. There might by no means come a time when The Marble Index won’t be avant-garde.
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After Nico’s departure from The Velvet Underground in 1967 and the baroque-folk mish-mash of her debut solo album, Chelsea Lady, it represented an entire self-reinvention, jettisoning not simply the reliance on different (male) songwriters however the model of the look of a traditional ’60s blonde – the Berlin to Catherine Deneuve’s Paris or Julie Christie’s London – that had introduced her work as a mannequin and the eye of lovers from Alain Delon to Brian Jones.
Time spent with Jim Morrison, whom she appears to have met whereas in Jones’s firm on the Monterey Pop Pageant, persuaded her to start writing songs, their lyrics – principally in her second language – influenced by the Romantic and Symbolist poets. With The Marble Index, its title borrowed from a line by Wordsworth, she emerged as, within the phrases of Leonard Cohen, one of many few “actually unique skills in the entire racket”.
Nico’s admirers have at all times heard the music they wish to hear. For almost all of them, that’s the anti-glamour of a massively detached Gothic existentialism with its roots within the bombed-out despair of wartime Berlin, nurtured in a darkly glittering inventive milieu and fueled by harmful medication. Jac Holzman, who signed her to his label in 1968, remembered Frazier Mohawk (previously Barry Friedman), the person he commissioned to supply her Elektra album, saying that her songs weren’t one thing you listened to however a gap you fell into.
Holzman hadn’t preferred Chelsea Lady however he preferred what he heard now: “Nico had a fantastic contralto voice and a vibrato that pulsed softly however quickly. Most vibrato bothered me. Hers didn’t.” Curiously, he heard in her music an echo of Jean Ritchie, the dulcimer-playing people singer from Kentucky’s Cumberland mountains whose personal debut album had been the label’s second launch, again in 1952.
Holzman and Mohawk employed John Cale, her former Velvets colleague and one other ex-lover, to rearrange and play on The Marble Index, giving him solely 4 days in a Los Angeles studio however free rein to encompass Nico’s songs and the drone of her transportable harmonium with all of the devices and results that took his fancy. From the melting music field of the 59-second instrumental opener, “Prelude”, and the silvery dissonances of the next “Lawns Of Daybreak”, the sound-pictures proceed to “Frozen Warnings”, the place Cale’s layered violas sound as if their strings are being vibrated by a chill wind from the steppes, and “Night Of Mild”, through which his clanging bells and jagged bowed bass intensify the imperturbability of Nico’s supply.
There are two additional tracks on a restricted seven-inch, each first heard on a 1991 reissue. The primary is the attractive “Roses In The Snow”, a people music from a unique world, ebbing and flowing in some unusual half-light. The second is “Nibelungen”, its title referencing a German epic poem from the twelfth century. Right here Nico’s voice is heard by itself, offering proof in her tone, phrasing and vibrato of the expressive management she had acquired. Provided that the unique launch of The Marble Index contained a mere 31 minutes of music, it’s mildly astonishing that room wasn’t discovered for these two beautiful tracks. However then Nico usually knew what she wished, and the unique eight-song album actually conveys a way of distilled perfection. Mohawk later claimed the credit score for that, suggesting that he and the engineer had edited it down within the remaining combine to what he thought was sufficient for any listener to tackle.
Its startlingly plain black and white cowl, utilizing a bleached-out Man Webster portrait {photograph} through which the singer’s helmet of darkish hair and emphatic cheekbones body an expression of enigmatic problem, might hardly have demonstrated a clearer break from her earlier publicity photographs. In itself it suggests a scarcity of compromise and the absence of a want to ingratiate.
Whereas blissful to have it on his label alongside such different cutting-edge artists as Love, The Doorways and Tim Buckley, Holzman confirmed little interest in a follow-up to an album that had offered solely a handful of copies. For the subsequent couple of years Nico drifted between New York, London and Paris, starting intense relationships with the movie director Philippe Garrel and with heroin, the latter influencing a lot of the remainder of her life. However in 1970 the producer Joe Boyd, now working for Warner Brothers in Los Angeles after beginning the careers of Fairport Conference, Nick Drake and others within the UK, persuaded his boss, Mo Ostin, to let him put Nico and Cale again collectively for a reprise.
The outcome was Desertshore, recorded in London: a extra lyrical, much less stunning album, however one filled with Cale’s creativeness in addition to songs impressed by Brian Jones (“Janitor Of Lunacy”), Andy Warhol (“The Falconer”), her just lately deceased mom (“Mütterlein”) and Ari Delon, her eight-year-old son (“My Solely Little one”). Ari himself is heard singing “Le Petit Chevalier”, from certainly one of Garrel’s movies. In an indication of Nico’s growing ability and ambition, among the songs even have second sections.
This time, Cale’s classical coaching is extra in proof. The medieval trumpets that beautify “Mütterlein” and “All That Is My Personal” are essentially the most startlingly vivid instrumental contact, contrasted by an angelic choir and a piano that rumbles like a bombing raid on the previous and by what seems like music for a Felliniesque carnival on the latter, which additionally options Nico’s soft-spoken recitative, a distinction along with her highly effective singing. “My Solely Little one” is carried out principally a cappella by Nico with a small choir. There’s a stark pathos within the piano ballad “Afraid”, which accommodates the road – “you might be lovely and you might be alone” – that offered the title for a current biography by Jennifer Otter Bickerdike.
Like its rapid predecessor, Desertshore loved negligible industrial success – actually not sufficient to influence Warner Brothers to supply her one other album. Neither did it obtain the identical vital standing, though some listeners discovered it simpler to understand, touched by the sentiments of loss and remorse that come by way of rather more clearly than the feelings so opaquely expressed in The Marble Index.
There can be a remaining a part of what turned out to be the Nico/Cale trilogy: The Finish, recorded for Island in 1974 and containing the model of The Doorways’ title monitor with which she paid homage to Morrison, below whose affect, throughout their affair in 1967, she had begun to write down the songs that refashioned her picture, deepened her thriller and secured her legend. With The Marble Index and Desertshore, it kinds a sequence in contrast to the rest in well-liked music, unclassifiable and inimitable however the inspiration for a lot that adopted.
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