Nick Cave and Warren Ellis Bring Their Best Scores to 'White Lunar'

For their latest release, Nick Cave and Warren Ellis are cleaning out their closet. And when that closet contains music composed by the Bad Seeds and his longtime sidekick in that band and, more recently, Grinderman, the result is, metaphorically speaking, one fantastic yard sale. "We make a lot of music," Ellis tells Spinner of his and Cave's artistic relationship. "At the beginning of the year, we thought it might be a nice idea to regroup everything."

The regrouping brought about the two-CD 'White Lunar,' due Sept. 22 on Mute Records. The first disc collects the pair's evocative, spare instrumental scores for 'The Proposition' (for which Cave wrote the screenplay) and 'The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,' along with preview tracks from the up-coming screen adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's 'The Road,' for which Cave and Ellis also composed the incidental music.

The second disc gathers some of the Australian natives' theater and documentary scores into a cohesive musical suite. Ellis describes it as a "conceptualized sort of thing. Mix it up, conceptualize it, that was the idea really with the second CD," he says, speaking from his home in Paris. He adds that the package was, "a bit of a culling. It felt like a good time to draw a line under it all and move on. Start afresh."

Still, 'White Luna' isn't an incidental music greatest hits hodgepodge. "It looks beautiful," Ellis says, adding that it sounds great too: "It's one of those older style records where if you sit down and give it some time, you'll get a lot out of it. It was put together with a lot of thought and care."