It’s easy to get Flume the musician talking, but what about Streten the man? What does he do in his downtime? “I don’t have downtime.” What about when he’s finished touring? “I do music. I always ask him, like: ‘Hey K, how do you get your drums so fat?’ And he never tells me.” “I have no idea how Kaytranada gets his drums so fat. This level of experimentation is taking him down routes few can follow – unlike his first album, after which Flume tutorials sprung up all over YouTube: “I could do a song and then go online and there would be like tons of videos doing what I did.” He can sympathise with that curiosity, though. And I’ve got a bunch of synths that are weird like that.” I never know what the fuck is going to happen, I just randomise for hours and hours until I find the gnarliest sounds. “It’s like a digital plant – you plant a seed to create a sound and then grow the ‘branches’ out and it just randomises things.” So can you ‘prune’ it then? “Pretty much – you can pick a branch you like the sound of and plant that new seed, and you go into the DNA helix to change the parameters. The mad-scientist vibe of his approach comes fully to life when he starts talking about one of his recent synth acquisitions, Synplant (shown above in glorious detail). You don’t know it, but it’s there – it just adds to the flavour of it all.” “It’s this really crazy sound,” he enthuses, “and that’s scattered throughout ‘Skin’. He singles out a Russian set of Foley recordings, which featured ten recordings of rocks being thrown down a metal pipe. ‘Skin’ saw him downloading “heaps” of sample packs for the most obscure sounds he could find. “I just randomise for hours and hours until I find the gnarliest sounds” His productions are just so clean and clinical but in the craziest way.” Adele‘s going to do beautiful piano ballads and they’re going to be nice with genius songwriting but that’s fifty percent of it for me – I want the other shit. “He’s doing shit that I’ve never heard, and that’s what I want. “I definitely want to explore the pop experimental thing a bit more,” he says, labeling his recent tour mate, London hyper-pop producer Sophie, as a key inspiration. Ahead of recording ‘Skin’ he set a randomiser going on his computer, left it recording for twenty minutes and later cut out melodies he liked. It was like theatre.”įlume’s music exhibits similar ambitions. It wasn’t like a typical EDM show where it’s 10/10 the whole time, bangers, bangers, bangers, bangers. “They would bring you down so low for so long and then they’d take you up. Everything’s just on the whole time.” Who are his live heroes then? The “super-slick” Chemical Brothers – because when he saw them for the first time, he was enraptured.
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“Look at Ultra Music Festival,” he says, “and look at the main stage. He still won’t comment on it, but he does distance himself from the EDM cash stop being a jealous little bitch and do us all a favor and just shut the fuck up.
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Earlier this year EDM bro Diplo accused his peer Zedd of using a ‘fake Flume drop’ in Zedd’s commercial M&Ms single ‘Candyman’ – but Streten remained gracefully diplomatic by saying nothing.
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There are higher profile comparisons to be made too. After the release of his self-titled debut, Flume’s home country was suddenly awash with bedroom producers inspired by him: “A lot of kids got excited, saw some kid who wrote this record in his bedroom at his parents’ house – and that was the story, because that was what happened – and they were like ‘Fuck yeah, I’m gonna get a copy of Ableton’.” The Aussie musician – real name Harley Streten – doesn’t name names, but he doesn’t really have to. “For lack of a better way of describing it,” says the 25-year-old electronica fanatic, “a lot of people just ripped off my sound. Flume’s second album ‘Skin’ was experimental by necessity.