You Muses Assist
In 1966, when Nico first started performing with the Velvet Underground —singing in her deep, Deutsche moan or, less flatteringly, standing idly banging a tambourine— it was believed that she had little musical talent. Sure, she was beautiful, a statuesque German model so cold and expressionless she seemed carved from marble. And her idiosyncratic voice —so doleful it bordered on absurd— was perfect for a band tearing down the strictures of rock'n'roll as they went. But Nico, as artist, was viewed like Nico as human-being: a study in artful nothingness.
On her 1967 debut, Chelsea Girls, she fulfilled only the role of chanteuse, singing a collection of songs penned for her by a range of men, including Jackson Browne, Tim Hardin, and Bob Dylan. Nico's best-known album —viewed by many as a sister-work to The Velvet Underground and Nico— is beloved, again, because of the contrast between her Gothic voice and the smooth '60s pop tunes; this, again, like an act of subversion.
None of which could've suggested what came next; what happened when this simple 'muse' found an instrument that felt like an extension of her, when this supposedly talentless belle tapped deep into an artistic vein previously undiscovered.
She's a Femme Fatale
When Nico started playing the harmonium, an archaic reed organ which creates sound via pumped air, she discovered not only her own artistic voice, but a whole new realm of sound. Departing completely from anything resemble pop or rock form, she found/founded her own form of modern composition. Bleeding out sombre laments and brutal dirges of intense medievalism, she sounds for all the world like she's wandering through the valley of death (or, in her language, walking "close to the frozen borderline").
Over four decades after its release, 1969's The Marble Index still sounds shocking; a work of radical avant-gardism cloaked in immediacy and intimacy; a suite of rootless songs written with little precedent, disconnected from what came before. That sense of being unmoored only adds to the genuine unease of these songs, which often exist without any kind of constant rhythm.
Whilst the bellows of the harmonium can't help but evoke breathing, Nico's pump-organ playing has all the inconstancy of the lungs. Coupled with the complete lack of percussion, of bass, of anything resembling a regular rhythmic back-bone, and you're left to drift along loch and moor, guided through the eerie fogs only by Nico's near-terrifying voice and the disturbing death-poetry it incants.
John Cale, the Velvets' most fervent avant-gardist, happily pushes Nico further into her own extremity. His few instrumental touches —viola, glockenspiel, mouth organ— make The Marble Index seem even more eerie, even more worldless. It makes for an astonishing haunting, the work of a woman who, even whilst alive, seemed a lot like a ghost.
Record Label: Elektra
Release Date: May 1969
