As it has been put to me recently: “you’ve got so many irons in the fire, its hard to keep track”.
Lets start with Iron #1: Winter People. We’ve been on tour recently with Melbourne songstress Gossling. The shows were great and the audiences very warm and appreciative (especially in one little venue in the Blue Mountains, which was probably my personal favourite show of the tour). The final show was in a huge ballroom in Melbourne, called the Thornbury Theatre. It was like playing to a gala dinner!

Also, this is a bit old but I forgot to post about it when it was released. We made this live acoustic clip for “Wishingbone” in an abandoned paper mill. Making video clips tends to be pretty exhausting (and certainly in this instance, after playing the song about 35 times over the course of the shoot, its taken awhile to regain my affection for it!)
And on the note of live-acoustic-videos, we recently did this unplugged version of Gallons in a Darlinghurst living room kindly lent to us by the drummer from the excellent Sydney band: Bearhug
We’re just starting our “Gallons EP” tour now, having played the first show in Melbourne, Sydney on June 7th, then Brisbane after that (then about 16 shows planned for the album tour). So really clocking up the frequent flyer miles in the coming months. Here’s a stream of the Gallons EP:
Iron #2: Matahorn. I’ve been working hard designing / coding / building Matahorn, which is intended to be “a music-centred interview broadcast site, coming from three perspectives: artists, industry and fans. The mission of the site is to give an insight into the personalities who constitute these three perspectives”. So far I’ve gathered up interviews with The Preachers, WIM, Jonti (of Danimals fame), Tim Whitten (engineer for The Go Betweens, Augie March etc.), the head of A&R at Sony ATV, Joel from Umbrella Management (Cloud Control, Urthboy, Belles Will Ring) and a whole lot more lined up. Here’s a sneak-peak at the pre-launch site design (full post on the Matahorn design & dev process coming soon):

Iron #3: Freelancing & Desiging & Start-Upping. I’ve started working on some really fantastic freelance projects lately. One I’m particularly excited about (but can’t talk about till its launched because of a Non-Disclosure) centred around the parallax scrolling effect, will be totally awesome when it launches. I’ve also been working hard on a start-up of my own, an application for the music publishing industry – something along the lines of a Spotify type app for music publishers to make their catalogues available to media buyers in a much more intelligent fashion than the current process allows. Here’s some mock-ups:


Iron #4: Bekin Labs. I feel blessed to live in the internet age primarily because of the web’s power as an educational resource. As someone who has always preferred self-directed learning to a course-driven / institutional model, the internet is like the greatest interactive library ever created. This is really only possible because of generous and knowledgeable folk sharing their discoveries online, and since I spend a great deal of time designing / developing for the web, I’ve decided to create my own resource. Hence I’m currently designing a new site called “Bekin Labs” that will be a journal on all things design, development, web and start-up related. I’ve written the first few articles on Jquery, designing to grids and parallax effects. Hopefully launching in the coming months.
So yes, “many irons in the fire” is about right, but it feels great to be burning all day long!

























