![]() ![]() I was super inspired, went home that night to a little Airbnb, and wrote that beat.” Beautiful place-it's super old, lots of castles. “Sintra was named after a place in Portugal called Sintra. ![]() It’s been a wild ride.” Here Streten walks through his favorite tracks on Flume. It was intense at a young age to have all that happen. Ironically, I ended up playing in clubs a lot after that, when it started to take off. The Flume stuff was just a bit of fun, a creative outlet for me to make stuff that wasn't for the club. “I had another project at the time called What So Not, which was more club stuff, and that was my main focus. “It was quite a shock as it was really just my side project,” he says. Streten is surprised by how much his debut album blew up when it was released in 2012. 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. 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. I remember it being so flooring and surreal. 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. As he told Apple Music about his choice of collaborators, “I want to find people who are doing something different and open to working with different sounds and unconventional beats-just open-minded people who have something to say.“I had my first fan interaction after my first gig,” Flume tells Apple Music, recalling his first performance in August 2011. Wherever electronic music is right now, you can be sure that whatever Flume is cooking up in his studio is two steps ahead. On the 2019 mixtape Hi This Is Flume, he dusted off his most experimental beats yet while linking up with slowthai, SOPHIE, and JPEGMAFIA. His twisted trap drums and spacious atmospheres proved the perfect foil for vocalists like Vic Mensa, Tove Lo, and Little Dragon, leading to production work for Lorde and Vince Staples. With 2016’s Skin, he showed his growth with trickier beats and more innovative sound-sculpting, without forgetting about the importance of a perfect hook (exhibit A: “Never Be Like You,” with a swoon-worthy topline from the Toronto singer kai). Those head-nodding beats and hazy effects quickly became staples on chill playlists, but Flume was already lining up his next wave. The sedate vibe was the flip side of EDM’s peak-time energy, but his slippery synths and ribbon-like vocal edits showed kinship with dubstep a sound many would soon call “future bass” was born. The following year, his self-titled debut album established the outline of his nascent sound, pairing spring-loaded drum programming with dreamily chopped-up samples. A decade later, the deliriously laidback vibe of his debut single, “Sleepless,” got him signed to Australia’s Future Classic. ![]() In a way, it did crack a code: To see music’s inner workings laid bare came as a revelation to young Streten. The free gift wasn’t a secret decoder ring, but a CD with rudimentary production software. Streten got his start making music when he was 10 or 11, when his dad bought him a box of cereal. In the process, he helped pioneer a whole new dimension of chill. In the early 2010s, just as main-stage EDM was pushing tempos and decibels into the red, Flume-aka Harley Streten, born in 1991-went in the opposite direction, delving into hip-hop beats and airy synths. Australia is a long way from electronic music’s principal hubs, but don’t tell Flume: When he was just 20 years old, the Sydney producer leveraged his easygoing surfer attitude into single-handedly changing the course of electronic music’s evolution. ![]()
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