Christa Päffgen—the singer, songwriter, actress, poet, model, and proto-goth icon known as Nico—died in 1988 on a grassy mountain road in Ibiza, on a bicycle ride into a nearby town to buy weed. After an accident, she died of a massive brain hemorrhage. It’s the type of event that spurs reflection on the nature of mortality. And now it has inspired a dense new work by New York and Berlin-based electronic group Soundwalk Collective, featuring vocals by Patti Smith, and found and self-constructed percussion from her daughter, Jesse Paris Smith.
To create field recordings, Soundwalk’s Stephan Crasneanscki, Simone Merli, and Kamran Sadeghi actually visited Ibiza, which is not particularly surprising. The group is known for finding the sounds they use the hard way; a 2012 work took them on a journey through the Amazon to collect source material from Peruvian shamans, for example. Their uncanny, intimate naturescapes on Killer Road create a sense of reality heightened enough to come back around to seeming artificial. Their source material—rustling tall grass, birds clustering and bickering in the trees, flies beginning to swarm, crickets humming—are smudged with delay, reverb, and crackling overdrive. The effect is the aural equivalent of a hazy, mirage-like film flashback. It feels like an appropriate methodology for a work which is attempting to re-enact a lost moment—to create something living and mutable from hearsay and police reports.
If it’s not already apparent, this is, in no way, a covers album or even standard-issue “tribute,” to its great credit. Patti detaches Nico’s poems—the reason the German actress became involved in music in the first place—from their original musical settings. The words are sourced from throughout Nico’s discography, from 1968’s formative The Marble Index to two potent texts off her final, industrial-tinged album, 1985’s Camera Obscura. “Fearfully in Danger” is the only moment where Smith slips into full-bodied song, but even then, her melody is not Nico’s. Her vocals—glottal, pitchy, with an assertive, bluesy twang—are swallowed up by the album’s fitting centerpiece: a long blare from Nico’s own trademark harmonium. (The instrument was the first direct connection between Smith and Nico: Smith rescued it from on a pawn shop in 1978).
In a 2013 interview discussing the forthcoming Killer Road, Smith pinpointed the common theme she senses in Nico’s writing, and what appealed to her about the project: the focus on the idea of “the inner voice.” There are, throughout this work, dominant phrases—“A true story wants to be mine/The story is telling a true lie,” “The honesty that lies to you,” “The hours since I saw you last/Have left me in an unknown past”—which suggest that the narrator’s deepest feelings and impressions are often not manifested in direct thought. Rather, they emanate in unpredictable, often destructive ways. In murder ballad “My Heart Is Empty,” Nico’s narrator and victim maintain a relationship of surface-level declarations, before the former’s true feelings arise in one culminating, brutal act. The rumbling drone chording of Soundwalk’s modular synth arsenal boils over, threatening to drown everything out. Smith compellingly exploits the peculiarities of her larynx, sliding between a sibilant whisper and quiet, foreboding speech as the narrator’s thoughts flit in and out of clarity.
It’s moments like these that work best, when the project ceases to be what many news headlines framed it as—Patti Smith reciting Nico poems over ambient music—and becomes a unified piece, where every part interacts with the text in a meaningful, just-less-than-literal way. The effect can be sonically absorbing, if not as emotionally compelling as its creators might have hoped. It comes across like a chilling ASMR experiment mixed with something by Robert Ashley or Steven “Jesse” Bernstein. When Smith detaches from the scenery (“Fearfully in Danger,” the gothic nursery rhyming of “I Will Be Seven,” the more straightforward “My Only Child”) the effect is more similar to Nico’s own vocal performances, but makes for less cohesive music overall. One can imagine the project’s subject would have ultimately preferred the more understated tracks, concerted in their muted menace—focused on the task of creating a cinematic impression of the unknowable.
