Nico

Picture this woman: blonde, an icy gaze, breathtakingly beautiful… Picture her enclosed in some eon, in some crevice of the universe, there where the Void lies, the Nothing. Think of an unclassifiable, timeless voice, something at the crossroads between the uncertainty of human speech and the solemnity of the divine Word… Well, more or less, this is Christa Paeffgen, known artistically as Nico. Now, without hesitation, try to picture a desert, a wasteland stretching as far as the eye can see, beyond the horizon. Let the wind freeze every last flicker of life, every breath: beyond all this lies a spectral, ashen music, tormented and sublime: at times you can glimpse the bloodless boundaries of "Desertshore", the immense whisper of solitude.

An extreme masterpiece of the "gothic", as well as one of the most extraordinary journeys that 20th-century music has ever undertaken into the folds of the human soul, "Desertshore" lives on absolute austerity, on an unbearable existential anguish. Its progress is that of a humanity unable to remedy its own fate; its solemnity is that of a scream rising from the depths of the centuries. As in a Munch painting, the background is on the verge of dissolving, giving way to an indecipherable mass of colours, to a diaphanous mutability. Following Nico's vocal evolutions, laid over the musical trajectories of John Cale (who here brushes against an essential form of "total, universal folklore"), following that perpetual lament of hers is a traumatic, excessive experience, but, in any case, inevitable and authentic.

From the opening "Janitor Of Lunacy" onwards, the impression is that of an unhealthy vortex, one that seizes you and shows no mercy: Nico's harmonium and Cale's organ chase and lose each other, in a remarkable dark synthesis. The voice is placed in a cramped space, in the darkest point of the mind: and from that point comes a primordial, prophetic language.

With every "rhythmic" impulse gone, no longer marking time, it's the music itself that seeps into space, a space that takes on an unprecedented "visual" quality thanks to these terrible "lieder" of the Eternal. "The Falconer" develops this "immanent tragedy" amid menacing organ rumbles and dissonant piano counterpoints. But there's also room for a very sweet piano sonata by Cale, a brief moment of light, just before Nico resumes, more than her singing, her "essential vision of the voice", a fundamental element especially in "My Only Child", sung a cappella, in utter solitude. Just a few shreds of choir and hints of horns, backlit, behind that timid, abyssal crackle of silence.

The neurotic tension is worn down further by "Le Petit Chevalier" (harpsichord and a child's French vocals) and by "Abschied" (dissonant violin, mournful organ and a marble-like voice). It's then impossible not to feel your heart sink during the achingly sweet (but with a grieving sweetness…) "Afraid", the moment when Nico stands right before you, bare, in her tragic and superhuman beauty, like a lone, sorrowful nymph amid a lake of mother-of-pearl. Enjoy this moment, because in "Mutterlein" a menacing wind begins to blow again. This apocalypse of the spirit straining toward Revelation is fulfilled with "All That Is My Own", amid minimalist keyboards, trumpets scratched by indistinct noise, and Cale's viola letting oriental sparks rise to the surface. In the background, that uncertain, inexplicable line of the desert.

Nico, sadly, left us long ago. That's the way things go on this earth… What will never abandon us, though, is this icy melancholy that accompanies our every moment. And that is why "Desertshore" is part of us. Now and forever.

Ride the wave of great music

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03/11/2006