All That is Her Own: Early Nico Albums Due for CD, Vinyl Reissue in March
Anyone who thought they had the sound of German actress/singer Nico figured out from her work on 1967’s The Velvet Underground & Nico and Chelsea Girl would not have expected what she did next – chapters in a musical career that will be explored on new reissues by Domino Recording Company.
On March 29, the label will issue newly remastered versions of 1969’s The Marble Index and 1970’s Desertshore on CD and vinyl, featuring unseen photos of the artist in the liner notes. The Marble Index includes two bonus tracks included on a 1991 reissue, making their vinyl debut on a bonus 7″ with the original album as well as being appended to the new CD.
The Velvet Underground & Nico and Chelsea Girl – the latter of which also featured contributions from VU members Lou Reed, John Cale and Sterling Morrison – would go on to be regarded as classics of the era, but Nico (born Christa Päffgen) felt they weren’t indicative of her artistic vision. “I still cannot listen to it,” she told an interviewer in 1981, “because everything I wanted for that record, they took it away.” At the suggestion of her friend, The Doors frontman Jim Morrison, she resolved to write her own songs. Jac Holzmann and Elektra Records took a chance on her work – largely played on harmonium – assigning former Beatles publicist/Buffalo Springfield manager Frazier Mohawk to produce her. (By Mohawk’s own admission, he and Nico spent their time together doing heroin, and he allowed Cale – who’d by then left The Velvet Underground – to oversee most of the sessions.)
The Marble Index took inspiration from European classical music and avant-garde arrangements that would influence Goth and ambient recordings in decades to come; the album also featured a dramatic physical transformation for the artist, who dyed her bleach-blonde hair red and wore all black on the album sleeve. It was a marked departure from a previous work that had multiple Jackson Browne songs. The album was belatedly praised by Lester Bangs, who deemed it “the greatest piece of ‘avant-garde classical’, ‘serious’ music of the last half of the 20th century so far.”
Follow-up Desertshore, released by Reprise Records, continued the aesthetic of The Marble Index in a slightly more digestible pop style. Again, Nico’s voice and harmonium are accompanied by Cale’s instrumentation; he co-produced the album alongside former Hannibal Records owner Joe Boyd. It, too, was only critically noted later on -particularly in the years after the 1988 bike accident that killed Nico. Acts including Björk, Morrissey and Throbbing Gristle.
Both reissues are available March 29 and can be pre-ordered below.
The Marble Index (Expanded Edition) (Domino, 2024)
CD: Amazon U.S. / Amazon U.K. / Amazon Canada
LP + 7″: Amazon U.S. / Amazon U.K. / Amazon Canada
- Prelude
- Lawns of Dawns
- No One is There
- Ari’s Song
- Facing the Wind
- Julius Caesar (Memento Hodié)
- Frozen Warnings
- Evening of Light
- Roses in the Snow
- Nibelungen
Tracks 1-8 originally released as Elektra EKS-74029, 1968
Tracks 9-10 released on original CD reissue – Elektra 74029-2, 1991
Desertshore (Domino, 2024)
CD: Amazon U.S. / Amazon U.K. / Amazon Canada
LP: Amazon U.S. / Amazon U.K. / Amazon Canada
- Janitor of Lunacy
- The Falconer
- My Only Child
- Le petit chevalier
- Abscheid
- Afraid
- Mütterlein
- All That is My Own
Originally released as Reprise RS 6424, 1970
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Surprised about the little to no CD extras given how many additional tracks were part of the Frozen Borderline 2CD set.