News Flume: Signed Tees And Gold Discs

Harley Streten is telling us about his first ever signing session as Flume. The kind you usually see a V-necked Peter Andre excitedly arriving at, camera crew in tow. “There was a group of girls and they were all wearing Flume shirts. I’m stoked that kids are getting into this sort of music. I always thought they got into weird shit, the Biebers and One Directions.”

At 21, Harley cuts a determined figure. He’s entirely honest in stating “I want this thing to go as big as possible.” What once began as a small side-project for a trained saxophonist, making damningly tagged “standard dance music” for a hobby, Flume has gone “gradually crazy”. The debut album hit Gold in Australia and Streten’s taken things further by signing international deals. Any greater success will be anything but pure accident.

“Flume was just the project where I wrote random tunes without any real boundaries,” explains Harley. “I didn’t really know if people would take well to it or not.” Beyond the obvious ambition, this is a project that reflects Harley’s habits and state of mind. He started out of boredom, and similarly, the album’s all-encompassing sound reflects the producer’s desire to look elsewhere for inspiration. “I couldn’t have made an album from just [debut single] ‘Sleepless’. I need fresh ideas.” He cites obscure sample packs and Flying Lotus’ experimentalism as primary influences. But at its heart, Flume’s debut LP is a party record: it simply aims to soundtrack as many parties as possible.

Flume might have broken big, to the extent that a once bedroom-ridden producer is touring for five successive months, all while signing t-shirts for teenagers, but Harley’s far from finished. Flume’s only heading for greater things.