Blixa Bargeld is departing Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds to focus on other projects. I believe a quiet screening of Wings of Desire is in order. Full press release from Mute below:

As a member of the very first line up of The Bad Seeds, Bargeld has played alongside and recorded with Cave for almost 20 years.

Bargeld says, "This has been a very difficult decision for me and I have spent a great deal of time thinking about it. My leaving has nothing to do with artistic or personal differences with the band, I just feel it is time to concentrate on other creative areas in my life".

Bargeld's departure will enable him to devote more time to his varied and expanding list of projects and interests outside of The Bad Seeds including fronting Einst�rzende Neubauten and his work in film and theatre.

Nick Cave says, "We have parted as friends and we will miss him dearly".

Mick Harvey, also a founding member of the band, adds "Blixa is irreplaceable, sadly we'll have to learn to get along without him".

The Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds shows currently scheduled for early summer will proceed as planned, but without Bargeld.


On the eve of Radio.Burnlab's launch, I read some extremely unfortunate news about my favorite radio station on Liz's site. WDET FM has suspended its streaming broadcast of music programs to comply with recent record industry rules.

"This decision was incredibly difficult for us," said Caryn Mathes, WDET General Manager. "We have been committed to serving listeners via our web stream, but we are not willing to compromise the programming that makes WDET so attractive to listeners. To continue to stream our music programming would require us to abandon a fundamental philosophy of our organization."

Radio.Burnlab will go online later today regardless, but the loss of music programming for WDET will be blow to our collection streaming audio links. 'DET is still one of the most comprehensive sources for NPR programming, so it will remain in the roster.

I've gone back and forth on this, but Burnlab will indeed take the plunge with original programming. The first pair of two hour mixes come from my own stockpile of dark electronic music and are very high quality (sound quality... aesthetic quality is for you to decide.) If this doesn't bring our server crashing down and lawsuits on our doorstep, mixes from other Burnlab conspirators will follow in regular rotation.
Stay tuned. (*ahem*)