The name Blixa is related to several cognates that go back to the Proto-Germanic *bl?kan?, from Proto-Indo-European *b?ley?-. In Swedish Blixt and Blixtra are derived from Blixa, in old-English blican is used, and the forms are related to the Dutch verb bliksemen, or noun bliksem, and the German blitzen, all meaning lighting flash.
Lightning is a natural phenomenon consisting of electrostatic discharges occurring through the atmosphere between two electrically charged regions. One or both regions are within the atmosphere, with the second region sometimes occurring on the ground. Following the lightning, the regions become partially or wholly electrically neutralized.
Lightning involves a near-instantaneous release of energy on a massive scale (between 200 megajoules and 7 gigajoules). The air around a lightning flash (30,000°C, 54,000 °F or 30,273.15 Kelvin) rapidly heats to temperatures of about five times hotter than the surface of the sun (5,500°C, 9,900°F or 5,800 Kelvin). An emission of electromagnetic radiation across a wide range of wavelengths occurs, some visible as a bright flash. Lightning also causes thunder, a sound from the shock wave which develops as heated gases in the vicinity of the discharge experience a sudden increase in pressure.
Blixa Bargeld is a German musician who has been the lead singer of the band Einstürzende Neubauten since its formation in 1980. Bargeld was also a founding member of the Australian rock band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, from 1983 until 2003. What’s most interesting about Bargeld as an artist is his deeply intellectual interpretation of art and the organic experience of his performances, combining the deconstructive, mystic ideas of total theater and Dadaistic happenings of Antonin Artaud (1896-1948), the nihilist, pessimistic, decaying views (to be or not to be/being there or not being there) of Romanian philosopher E.M. Cioran (!911-1995) and the mystic rational views of German Jewish Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), to break down not only the walls between artist and spectator, but place the temporal and ephemeral of creation so at the center that destruction is the nirvana state and mechanism of creation. These Schopenhaueran and Nietzschean ideas are deeply rooted in post-modern European existentialism, and it’s a perspective on life that I grew up in and determined my experiences in life. To disrupt becomes the essence of creation, like a lighting shift emission.
The logo of the band Einstürzende Neubauten goes back to a Monadic symbol also found in John Dee’s “Monas Hieroglyphica” (1564) and “The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosencreutz” (1616), the best known of the three anonymous manifestos of the Rosicrucians.
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