ARTiST: Nico
TiTLE: The Frozen Borderline: 1968-1970
LABEL: Rhino
GENRE: Rock
TiME: 143:30 min
SiZE: 171,6 MB
BiTRATE: VBRkbps
RiP DATE: Feb-27-2007
RELEASE DATE: Feb-26-2007
WEBSiTE: n/a
Track List:
CD1 The Marble Index
01. Prelude 01:00
02. Lawns Of Dawns 03:11
03. No One Is There 03:36
04. Ari's Song 03:21
05. Facing The Wind 04:58
06. Julius Caesar (Memento Hodie) 05:02
07. Frozen Warnings 04:01
08. Evening Of Light 05:45
09. Sagen Die Gelehrten (Outtake) 03:53
10. RΩve RΘveiller (Outtake) 04:07
11. Roses In The Snow (Outtake) 04:00
(Alternate Version)
12. Nibelungen (Outtake) (Complete Version) 03:16
13. Lawns Of Dawns (Alternate Version) 03:15
14. No One Is There (Alternate Version) 03:41
15. Ari's Song (Alternate Version) 03:15
16. Facing The Wind (Alternate Version) 05:06
17. Julius Caesar (Alternate Version) 05:02
18. Frozen Warnings (Alternate Version) 04:21
19. Evening Of Light (Alternate Version) 05:41
CD2 The Desertshore
01. Janitor Of Lunacy 04:05
02. The Falconer 05:43
03. My Only Child 03:31
04. Le Petit Chevalier 01:18
05. Abschied 03:05
06. Afraid 03:31
07. Mⁿtterlein 04:41
08. All That Is My Own 03:36
09. My Only Child (Demo) 04:16
10. Janitor Of Lunacy (Demo) 03:58
11. Abschied Ode (Death/farewell) (Demo) 03:01
12. You Are Beautiful (Afraid) (Demo) 03:18
13. The Falconer (Demo) 05:46
14. On The Desert Shore (All That Is My Own) 12:45
(Demo)
15. Hidden Track 04:25
Release Notes:
When her first solo album, Chelsea Girl, had
appeared in 1968 on the back of the first Velvet
Underground album, Nico had not been best pleased
with the results. She didn't like the string
arrangements that producer Tom Wilson had added to
her performances. She had clearly been shopping at
Harrods for the material - with songs by Tim Hardin,
her Velvets colleagues Lou Reed and John Cale, teen
prodigy Jackson Browne, and one number, "I'll Keep
It With Mine", written specifically for her by Bob
Dylan. But she didn't like the way it represented
her as just another flaxen-haired folkie chanteuse
lacking the creative wherewithal to write her own
songs. She was frustrated at being better known as
the companion or lover of famous artists - Andy
Warhol, Federico Fellini, Dylan, Alain Delon, Jim
Morrison, Brian Jones - than as an artist in her own
right.s
That would all change with her extraordinary
follow-up album The Marble Index, one of that rare
breed of recordings which, the better part of four
decades later, still has no adequate comparison,
existing in a genre all its own. The title derives
from Wordsworth's ôThe Preludeö, where
Louis-Francois Roubiliac's sculpture of Sir Isaac
Newton is described as "The marble index of a mind
forever voyaging through strange seas of thought,
alone." ItÆs a line which summarises perfectly the
sense of questing isolation that comes through so
strongly in songs like "No One Is There" and "Facing
The Wind".
Part of the inspiration for the album came from
another ex-lover, Leonard Cohen, who encouraged Nico
to take up the harmonium, the pedal-powered keyboard
instrument whose wheezing drones would subsequently
underpin all her future work, and which furnished a
suitably haunting, miasmic base for her own
compositions. As she began giving solo performances
at The Scene nightclub in New York, Nico caught the
ear of Elektra A&R man Danny Fields, who introduced
her to label head Jac Holzman.
It was a fortuitous match of company and artist:
Elektra had made its reputation shepherding
idiosyncratic artists through the '60s folk-rock
boom, and despite her ice-queen voice and unusual
instrument, Fields and Holzman recognised a talented
singer-songwriter to stand alongside the likes of
Tim Buckley and David Ackles. They were keen to have
John Cale work on the project, but to cover his his
lack of experience, installed Elektra soundman
Frazier Mohawk as nominal producer.
Mohawk is one of rock's Zelig figures, his name
cropping up throughout the late '60s in a variety of
contexts - he was, for instance, the one who named
Buffalo Springfield after a piece of farming
equipment - and he sensibly took a back seat to Cale
and Nico's lead. Mohawk and engineer John Haeny
ensured that the musicians' parts were clearly
captured during the four-day session.
They needed to be, too: Nico's voice and harmonium
might easily flood the lower register, while John
Cale's various instrumental parts were all
improvised, and could pull the songs in unforeseen
new directions. The combination works beautifully on
"Lawns Of Dawns", where his twinkling celesta and
glockenspiel are like a starlit sky above the
oceanic pitching and yawing of Nico's undulating
harmonium riff. The sense of exquisite disquiet is
further increased by the vibrato guitar part that
surges in and out as the song progresses.
Cale's working method was to overdub individual
improvised parts without reference to each other,
then organise the arrangements from the disparate
parts. It was a means of avoiding the kind of cosy,
routine string arrangements that had ruined Chelsea
Girl. "Each take, you didnÆt have any idea of the
centre of the song," he explained. "They all had an
implied core, and then a real core.ö It was a
strategy that intensified the sense of chilly
solitude and intense yearning in songs such as
"Frozen Warnings" and "No One Is There", Cale's
austere string lines providing the perfect setting
for Nico's lonely lines like "All of them are
missing as the game comes to a start/No one is
there". The album built to a suitably harrowing
conclusion with "Evening Of Light", where Nico's
apprehension of "midnight winds" at "the end of
time" are borne on a bed formed by a minimalist,
cyclical celesta figure, while discreet, tortured
string lines cut across each other in a bout of
atonal jousting.
It was a short album, mainly because Mohawk and
Haeny couldn't listen to much more than half an hour
of it. "It kind of made us want to slit our wrists,"
he recalled. "The Marble Index isnÆt a record you
listen to. ItÆs a hole you fall into.ö This was only
the first of many similar responses to the album.
After Elektra's West Coast head and hip scenemaker
David Anderle was played the final mix in a darkened
studio, he sighed with relief and said, "I had no
idea this was going on!" But Jac Holzman, to his
credit, recognised the album's intrinsic quality -
albeit not enough to sponsor the follow-up
Desertshore, which appeared a few years later on
Reprise.
This time Cale was both producer and arranger, and
the settings were marginally less terrifying:
"Afraid" was sung over a gentle blend of piano and
viola, while Nico's celebration of youthful fire,
"My Only Child" - one of several pieces inspired by
or written for her son Abi - came decked out in
gorgeous three-part harmonies, with a lonely horn
coda at the conclusion. But elsewhere, things are as
tense and harrowing as before, particularly on
"Mutterlein", whose Gothic cathedral of sound
incorporates cacophonous piano clusters, bleak
horns, and clanking industrial percussion.
Both albums are reissued here accompanied by batches
of demos, out-takes and alternative versions, many
confirming the clarity, throughout the two projects,
of Nico and Cale's vision for her songs. She would
continue to voyage through strange seas of thought,
alone, for the rest of her career, though never
again with quite the potency and dark distinction of
The Marble Index.