Nico
The Frozen Borderline: 1968-1970

Every now and then, cyclically, tied to some unknown event (seasonal, spontaneous, mental), Nico returns to my life.

Maybe it's already been two years since the last listening, obviously obsessive, almost abusive for my mental health, when exhausted I tried to quickly replace it with sounds that would scream its distance — I don't know, Skylarking, Pithecantropus Erectus, and The Low End Theory one after the other, even though thinking about it... but it's just a sly goodbye from her, something like "you'll fall for it again, I'm always here."

I have no desire to rid myself of Nico, it's just a healthy break, a gulp of oxygen while waiting for the next relapse. Then, there are always some stimulating intrigues — a new biography, always worse than the previous one; videos, testimonies, and tributes on YouTube, the fragment of the film where she appears for 30 seconds, La dolce vita back in theaters, downloading L’Enfant secret by Garrel (and even watching it!).

No need for theories and complex analyses, much of the obsession with Christa Päffgen stems from a dual mythology, fueled for over fifty years by the most disparate sources: the debut album by the Velvet and the transformation from the world’s most beautiful woman to a toxic freak in an almost Cronenbergian sequence.

Nico's music is sometimes spoken of as an incidental fact compared to the real narrative, a depressing oddity and little more. And one thinks, even the last insult to her memory.

Nico was a tainted spirit, a hell of a character (to be polite), a ball and chain for those who frequented and endured her in her final years, and at the same time a very fragile creature and an alien, authentic, and unheard composer, despite all the expressive limitations she imposed on herself, from the harmonium to the funereal frame of the songs.

Hers is also the story of legendary stubbornness. Non-musician before Eno (and it’s no coincidence the two respected each other unconditionally), with an absurd and for many, off-putting voice, she invented herself as a unique artist by locking herself in dark rooms by the light of candles alone, endlessly repeating scales on her portable instrument’s keyboard (the poor Viva, a former Warhol superstar who hosted Nico during that time, often talked about it, and the wicked description is hilarious).

https://thebluemoment.com/2015/11/17/nico-in-london-1971/

Nico’s harmonium apprenticeship follows a harmonic progression unrelated to her contemporaries; her musical universe is in an abstract and immutable medieval world rather than in the bubbling Anglo-Saxon rock scene. And while many other and far more famous artists rushed to India to shake off an unwieldy self-referential Western identity, Nico plunged into her musical autarky as if inside a hyperbaric chamber.

Nico's albums, excluding the even more unfortunate Drama of Exile, are also the result of the friendship and fusion collaboration with John Cale. It seems that the priestess of darkness and the Prince of arrangements actually did not work side by side but in perfect solitude. Cale intervened on an already-defined voice/harmonium skeleton, and though the final discussions were far from calm, the two exiled Europeans from their respective countries always ended up understanding each other.

So, what makes the double collection The Frozen Borderline: 1968-1970 interesting compared to the individual The Marble Index and Desertshore considered the summa musicæ of Nico's production?

First of all, beyond the graphics and the excellent remastering, it’s the ability to listen to the two albums as testimonies of a common inspirational source, which deviates and realigns with minimal but perceptible interventions over those two years. Nico over time improves both vocally and compositionally, even if many prefer the inhospitable barbarity of Marble to the more calibrated despair of Desertshore. In the former, Cale is more invasive (although we are always talking about very measured intrusions) and compensates for Nico’s limited experience as an alchemist of sounds and noises, playing between tonality and concretism, classicism, and electricity. In Desertshore the former Velvet is (with one exception) more of an accompanist, aware that his problematic protégée has full mastery of her own art.

The other reason that makes the collection necessary is the presence of numerous outtakes and alternative versions. On other occasions, such contributions are nothing but superfluous and annoyingly tedious leftovers for fans and completists. In Frozen Borderline (I almost wrote just Frozen before realizing the danger) the original versions for harmonium and voice of these dark classics are little surprises that project us back to Nico’s initial intentions, often smoothed out by the Welshman's chiseling.

I still remember the first time I heard You Are Beautiful, a primitive track of what would later become the well-known (and phenomenal) Afraid, perhaps the only romantic and conciliatory concession of the post-Chelsea Girl Nico, with Cale’s piano and viola leading the dance. Here it is another song, more febrile, anguished, and atonal, equally indispensable, sung even in a higher octave (within Nico's limited range, of course). And towards the end, to apologize for an inaccuracy, we hear her whisper “It doesn’t matter that I hit another note ... it’s not... just a demo”.

Emotion, curtain.