Nico: Desolation Angel

Nico: Desolation Angel

The truths sought by an artist like Nico are elusive, personal, equivocal. Nico is a perfectionist of anti art; a pessimist who somehow manages to fashion beautifulhallucinations from her sense of isolation. Her songs unite the search for, and despair of, salvation with the existential traditions of the European chanteuse. The fleeting, shadowy . figures who populate her world are possessed of an irreconcilable melancholy, lost in a nihilist void. While many artists examine the plight of their characters, Nico is more concerned with the structure of the trap.

Her songs isolate a set of metaphors for dealing with the unpleasant facts of twentieth century life -s the desolate sub-culture of hustlers, lovers and silence addicts with the hinterland of empty hotels and early morning confessions. Nico’s words are' accurate newscasts from the unconscious, that narrative stage upon which .the whole business of human experience is constantly being dramatised. The scope and depth of her performance result from the artiste’s obvious awareness of life, her care for true and revealing diction.

—Nico is the most ethereal of Andy Warhol’s superstars she has a remote," icy beauty, like a face glimpsed ih a dream. Seeing her perform one thinks of a medieval princess or one of Fellini’s wounded angels. Her voice is cold and stark — she has seentoo much and been hurt too many times. The pain shows through, the haunted inflection bearing associations with Berlin where much of her childhood was spent.

Nico’s background is diverse - she appeared with Delon in La Dolce Vita met the Stones and joined Warhol’s Factory in New York, the super chic world of Ingrid Superstar, International Velvet, Ondine and Baby Jane Holzer, At the Balloon Farm she sang with the Velvet Underground as part of the Exploding Plastic’ Inevitable, a kinetic, stroboscopic trip which was probably the first ever mixed-media experience, j After cutting an album with the. Underground she,split the:East Side m 1 began composing' herself on an Indian harmonium. Nico has made two albums — Chelsea, Girl (named’after the Warhol film in which she appeared) and The Marble Index.

Marble Index could be a sound track for . 2001; a droning, circular succession of mantric chants; like the slow motion collision of two mouths. The influence of Warhol is evident in' the timeless, frozen quality of the songs. Background, is harmonium, cello, violin, electronics; the Index is infinity music overlaid with an obscure and ritualistic text. On the album notes to Highway 61 Revisited, Dylan explained: “songs On this specific record are not so much songs as exercises in breath control”.-, Nico’s songs seem to resemble little more than exercises in sustained surrealist repartee. The crucial sub-text is internal, it remains buried under words. Nico’s ideas are abstractions; peel away. the layers and there lies the truth. Her songs are an escape from pain, a withdrawal into the frozen, self-created universe of the phyche.

From a musical point of view, The Marble Index is difficult to criticize, since It is so bound up in Nico’s own mystique and personal philosophy. Arranger John Cale of the ,Velvet Underground employs electronic sounds, chamber music and Georgian rhythms in an imaginative and inventive fashion — never allowing them to drown.. Nico’s plaintive voice. “Facing the Wind” and “Frozen Warnings” are minor masterpieces; the sounds crystallizing into a wailing, awesome hymn of sorrow and isolation. Nico’s voice achieves a strange intensity, blending like another instrument.

Nico’s appearances in Britain have been few rshe performed at an Implosion concert some time ago, looking more lost and haunted than ever. Her voice seemed more fragile and vulnerable than on record. She accompanied herself on the harmonium and held a large, audience captive with songs like “No One is There”, which *ave a glimpse of her talent as a lyricistFhe European influence was strohg, the :areful pronounciation reminding one jf, Dietrich and Greco. Hopefully there vill be more records and appearances — md perhaps someday Nico will be ecognized as one of the few original alents around.