Flume

“I had my first fan interaction after my first gig,” Flume tells Apple Music, recalling his first performance in August 2011. “I was super nervous. After the show, I was on the way out and I met someone on the stairwell who was a fan and we just had a chat. I remember it being so flooring and surreal. I didn't really know how to respond. From that moment, I started to look at it differently—I always thought that I was okay at doing music and I had fun doing it, but I never really thought I could actually make a career out of it.” Real name Harley Streten, the producer was still living at home in Manly and waiting tables at Hard Rock Cafe. It wasn’t until a couple months after that first gig that he won a demo contest, got signed by Future Classic, and left his job to focus entirely on what soon became an incredibly successful career. Streten is surprised by how much his debut album blew up when it was released in 2012. “It was quite a shock as it was really just my side project,” he says. “I had another project at the time called What So Not, which was more club stuff, and that was my main focus. The Flume stuff was just a bit of fun, a creative outlet for me to make stuff that wasn't for the club. Ironically, I ended up playing in clubs a lot after that, when it started to take off. It was intense at a young age to have all that happen. But it’s grown and grown and grown. It’s been a wild ride.” Here Streten walks through his favorite tracks on Flume.
Sintra “Sintra was named after a place in Portugal called Sintra. Beautiful place—it's super old, lots of castles. It’s like Disneyland in real life. We spent the day there. I was super inspired, went home that night to a little Airbnb, and wrote that beat.”
Holdin On “I went to my friend's studio—Michael Di Francesco, Touch Sensitive. He's also on Future Classic, and he gave me this folder of all these classic soul vocal samples. I found that Otis Redding sample in there and just started messing around with it at home in my little bedroom studio. It came together pretty quickly; I was just super inspired by all of these amazing vocals and things that he gave me on this hard drive. Those samples fueled a lot of the record. I felt like I knew that there was something special here when I made it, but I didn’t expect it to travel how it traveled. Looking back, it is pretty interesting to see how that record did influence a lot of music, especially in Australia at the time.”
Left Alone (feat. Chet Faker) “I was in Maastricht, in the Netherlands, staying with a friend, and I sent Nick [Murphy] a demo that I was working on. He sent me back some vocals; it just came together online. I was doing a lot of bike riding around the city and just exploring, and I just get really creative and really inspired from exploring. Now I’ve figured out how to create the inspiration, but I used to have to wait for it. I’ve got control over it in a sense. I've actually made a little card game with three decks—a rule, a source, and a process. When I create those boundaries, I find that I can get quite creative. It’s a good little trick.”
On Top (feat T.Shirt) “I remember that being one of the only songs that had been done hung over that sounded good. I'd been out at Chinese Laundry until 4. I was severely hung over, but I was like, ‘Fuck it. I'm going to try and write something anyway.’ So I started that little beat thing, and it all came together. I sent the track off, it was kind of done remotely.”
Insane (feat. Moon Holiday) “We actually did that together, in person. She was on Future Classic, so we met up, and yeah, she's really cool. That ‘go insane’ vocal is also from a happy hardcore sample pack, just chopped-up vocals and then she added in some of the verse. I was really happy with how that one turned out.”
Ezra “I wrote that one when I had my first gig in Perth and I played at this place called The Bird, I think it was like 150 capacity. The promoter didn't have money for a hotel, so I stayed at his house. He had this organ in the corner. I was like, ‘Do you play?’ He's like, ‘No. This is actually Kevin Parker's old house and that's his.’ Apparently he did a lot of InnerSpeaker with that organ, so it was kind of cool. Anyway, I stayed there, and before the show I sat down at the bar, got a beer, and made a little beat, and it was this beat.”
Bring You Down (feat. George Maple) “We recorded that together. I started that idea in Germany at a hostel. It was quite cold; we there there just after winter. I wrote that one in the hostel after exploring for the day. It sat on my hard drive for a while, but I got back to Australia and linked up with George Maple at her place in the Northern Beaches and we recorded it.”
What You Need “This was a bit sad. I was in the UK with a friend from school and we'd run out of money at the end of the trip. We'd run out of money and I was sitting on the counter at the kitchen, and we were both just a bit down because we had been going pretty hard, as you do when you're 19, 20 in Europe for the first time. So this is the end-of-trip comedown song.”