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The cover shows a woman now mature, far from the smiling Nico from "La Dolce Vita" with a helmet on her head and a candelabrum in her hand, distant from Andy Warhol's Factory, from the Velvet Underground. With a serious, thin face. A chanteuse, a priestess of music. Immersed in a world that will reveal itself to us gradually as we dive track by track into her heart.
"The Marble Index" is Nico's return to the Europe of her childhood. Even if the melodies are not folk from the Mittel-European tradition, something beyond physical perceptions takes us exactly to those hills far from the sea, full of immense and unfathomable forests. Among the medieval castles of various princes, to their courts, wrapped in the melodic stories of minstrels.
This album is of a genre that is impossible to define. It is so avant-garde, that even now it is beyond every traditional and non-traditional structure. It is an absolute innovation, born from the fusion of two very close sensibilities: Nico and Cale. And the latter certainly played a part in the end result of the entire work.
The constant of every single song on "The Marble Index" is that the music accompanying Nico's pure voice is like the wind. An inconstant wind, that torments and unsettles. The beautiful effect is achieved thanks to Cale's oscillating strings and Nico's Indian harmonium, then mixed in a particular way. The poetic lyrics, made of words that freeze the soul, the music like a distant echo, recall some of Bruegel's paintings. The winter day that doesn't even have time to be born and is already preparing to die, in pale red and yellow. Eternal melancholy of landscapes of leafless trees, spotting the horizon with black, lifeless patches. It is in this setting that Nico chants her sparse and beautiful laments, in complete solitude, in the fairytale and legendary atmospheres, centuries away from our world.
The first version lacked "Roses In The Snow" and "Nibelungen", the latter performed by Nico without any accompaniment. "Ari's Song" is dedicated to the son born from the liaison with Alain Delon.
"The Marble Index" is somewhat a prelude to Nico's masterpiece: "Desertshore", with which she will reach the apotheosis of her musical career.
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