Pitchfork: No-Wave Icon Lizzie Descloux Dies

The influential no-wave musician, Lizzie Mercier Descloux, died on April 20th of cancer. She was cremated and her ashes put into the Mediterranean Sea. The French-born Descloux emigrated to New York in her youth, and there fell among the avant-garde crowd and released two albums on the Ze Records label, 1979's Press Color and 1981's Mambo Nassau. Press Color contained covers of "Mission Impossible" and Arthur Brown's "Fire" which were much loved by the scenesters of a generation past. Mambo Nassau is the album she is most remembered for, and contains elements of both no-wave and traditional world music, as well as a Kool & The Gang cover, and was a great influence upon the Talking Heads.

Described in her Ze Records biography as "a French boyish poetry cute girl singer living in New York," Descloux was a friend and fellow artist to Patti Smith and was admired by many. In 1981, an article was written about her and Mambo Nassau in Sounds magazine, entitled "Sex with Style." Let it be her eulogy now: "Lizzie Mercier Descloux is a cunning naif, an aware waif, an experienced virgin, a tipsy teetotaller and a star in the shoddy, shady niche of obscurism... These songs are the current number ones in Heaven... Mambo Nassau is an album to be cherished, to be over played, left alone and then returned to. It is the tastiest sweet in the shop. It embodies the heavy thudding of a heart in love."