Nico, The Marble Index
"If all you know of Christa "Nico" Päffgen's music are her vocals for that iconic first VU album, this, the first of what has come to be seen as her trilogy (Marble Index / Desertshore / The End…), may help refine your view of her talent and accomplishments (album lyrics here).
When one thinks that she wrote and recorded these—with the collaboration of old bandmate John Cale, who brought his arranging, composing, and recording nous to work with her sound and vision—in 1968, not 1988, it's quite remarkable as a sui generis piece of individual genius and as the forgotten progenitor of much of what would become goth, darkwave/cold wave, and the like.
Some background via Wikipedia:
"The American singer Jim Morrison, whom Nico later called her 'soul brother', encouraged her to write her own songs; this was 'a key breakthrough' for her. They were together in California in July and August 1967, often driving into the desert and experimenting with peyote. Morrison, who encouraged Nico to write down her dreams, read the writings of Mary Shelley, William Blake and Samuel Taylor Coleridge to her. He recorded his chemical visions and dreams, using the material for his songs as he imagined the opium-addicted Coleridge had worked. In 1986 Nico said, 'He taught me to write songs. I never thought that I could … He really inspired me a lot. It was like looking in a mirror then.' She began writing material and performing it to an intimate audience at Steve Paul's club, the Scene. Nico composed her music on a harmonium bought, according to Richard Witts, from a San Francisco hippie. Her manager, Danny Fields, said that she may have acquired it through the Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen. The harmonium became her trademark with which 'she discovered not only her own artistic voice but a whole new realm of sound'."
(more details on the inspired/troubled Morrison-Nico relationship here) well sort of
She dipped into Wordsworth, one of her favorites, and his magnum opus, The Prelude (the 1850 posthumous, final version), for her album's title:
And from my pillow, looking forth by light
Of moon or favouring stars, I could behold
The antechapel where the statue stood
Of Newton with his prism and silent face,
The marble index of a mind for ever
Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.
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