Wood and Wire

Who would have thought that an almost complete lack of features could make an application so useful?

WriteRoom is a new Mac application that does word processing

For Mac users who enjoy the simplicity of a typewriter, but live in the digital world. WriteRoom is a full screen, distraction free, writing environment. Unlike standard word processors that focus on features, WriteRoom is just about you and your text.

I’m doing a whole lot of writing for The Pure Drop at present, and the lack of features is helping me focus on the main game — stringing words together. The only downside is that the green-on-black interface shows up all the dirt, so I’ve had to clean my monitor

Oh, and there’s a port for Windoze too.

I just realised it’s been quite a long while since I last wrote about The Pure Drop, despite the fact that it’s been the project keeping me busy for most of the last few months.

We’ve been busy filming interviews and performances around Australia by The John Butler Trio, Zulya Kamalova, Silvia Entcheva, Linsey Pollak and Trouble In The Kitchen. Later this month we’re off to Toronto to film Tanya Tagaq, then Stockholm to film a piece about Garmarna, Yorkshire to meet up with Martin Carthy and Norma Waterson, and finally Byron Bay to interview Mandawuy Yunupingu.

In the meantime, the thepuredrop.com.au page has a sneak preview of Reg Mombassa’s fabulous site design.

UPDATE: The site is now live - check it out!.

It’s a great relief to be back in production on The Pure Drop, after a hiatus of about a year. We’re hoping to have a first (skeletal) version of the site online by Christmas, and aiming for launch mid-2006.

The best news is we’ve just signed up Reg Mombassa of Mambo, Mental As Anything and Dog Trumpet fame to do graphics for the site.

Reg is a wonderful man to work with — probably the least precious artist I have ever met. And he lives just around the corner!

Just uploaded another 30 or so snapshots from last year’s Pure Drop film shoot in Europe to my Flickr account. Most of this batch are from Iceland, including some good shots of Sigur Rós in concert. The guys were very accommodating, actually letting us film from the side of the stage, so we got some good angles.

By the way, if you want to see some truly great photos of Iceland, go to Pascal Fellonneau’s wonderful Iceland Image Bank site. Pascal has managed to perfectly capture the bizarre combination of funky scandinavian design and frontier town that typifies Reykjavik.

I’m already fully addicted to Audioscrobbler/Last.FM, but Pandora looks very cool as well. It actually did a pretty good job of navigating through my very particular (and sometimes peculiar) tastes in music.

It originally attracted my attention because the team that makes it is called the Music Genome Project, which is very similar to the tagline we occasionally use for The Pure Drop — “the world music genome project”.