Nick Cave "Reunites" With Ex-Bad Seed Blixa Bargeld On Audiobook

09/18/09 5:15pm

by Liisa Ladouceur (CHARTattack)

Blixa Bargeld and Nick Cave together again at last... in book form?

Cave, the singer/composer/author whose latest novel, The Death Of Bunny Munro, brought him to Toronto for a public signing event this week, has announced that his former bandmate Bargeld was tapped to read the story aloud for the German audiobook.

Fans of the iconic Bad seeds guitarist, who left Cave's side in 2003, will be able to hear Bargeld narrating Bunny Munro as of Saturday. He'll be accompanied by Cave and his current righthand man, violin player Warren Ellis. Cave tells CHARTattack it was the German publishers idea but that he was all for it.

"I'm really very, very pleased that Blixa wants to do it," said Cave. "It means, I assume, that he likes the book, which means a huge amount to me. I see Blixa off and on, but now I get a chance to kind of work with him again."

The Bunny Munro audiobook is a fairly extensive project involving an original score by Cave and Ellis. The hallucinogenic story follows a travelling salesman with a drug addiction and unchecked libido careening towards his doom. The original language version is narrated by Cave himself and features special effects and a 3-D sound mix for immersive listening.

"Every time I talk about the audiobook I feel like I'm doing a 'plug' for it," admits Cave. "But I'm genuinely excited about it. I feel that Warren and I, along with the artists who helped produce it and the company that did the spatialized sonic wizardry, have done something that's never been done before. It is a revolutionary thing and it's really beautiful."

Cave will read aloud from The Death Of Bunny Munro at a series of European events next month, accompanied by live music from Ellis and, seemingly, an appearance by Bargeld in Hamburg, Germany on Oct. 10.

Tour dates plus audio and video samples are available at the Bunny Munro website.

Sprechen ze deutch/Neubauten? Check out the German audiobook with Blixa here.

Check out CHARTattack next week for the full interview with Cave.