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In 2012, Flume shook the electronic music scene with the huge, wonky synth parts, heavy beats and chopped vocals of his self-titled debut. Such an intricate, rich and abrasive sonic palette is not unusual for a Flume record. “There’s so much diversity on the record, you know? There’s a wide range of sounds and every song is quite different.”
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The paths that haven’t been trodden,” 30-year-old Harley Streten tells MusicTech when asked about his wild sound design.
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You might be able to decipher some of them but certainly not the body-shaking bass parts in Get U. Go on, we’ll even give you til the end of this article. Fans of ‘Skin’’s dance-pop hits will be satiated, too, with lead single ‘Say Nothing’ featuring Australian artist May-A, the closest rival to that album’s standout, Tove Lo-featuring single ‘Say It’.Listen to Flume’s new album, Palaces, and try to imagine just how he conjured its supermassive sounds. ‘Only Fans’, a collaboration with Spanish artist Virgen María, fuses carnal vocals with industrial beats, and there are moments of filthy bass-heavy electronica (‘Get U’) and chaotic hyper-pop (‘Highest Building’, ‘Escape’) elsewhere. That’s not to say Streten forgoes the bangers altogether. The title track, meanwhile, sounds like the sun rising after a wild night, with bird song (and his pal Damon Albarn’s distinctive vocals) guiding you home as the darkness ebbs away. Elsewhere, the euphoric ‘Go’ begins with ASMR-friendly sounds of running water, with bouncy hooks and lush production later erupting into a jubilant floor-filler. On the cinematic ‘Jasper’s Song’, trilling piano arpeggios are pulled and pushed through woozy processors – it’s the equivalent of a stoned geezer boshing out a Ludovico Einaudi piece on a short-circuiting keyboard. The results of this shift see Streten’s distinctive sonics imbued with an ethereal twist. The move shook him out of a creative rut: “Coming here and doing fuck all made it possible to unblock whatever was going on”. “I just need the space and the peace and quiet,” he told NME of the move in a recent interview for our In Conversation video series, explaining that the chilled lifestyle, where he could live among local wildlife, ended up being extremely conducive to his process. Inspired by the natural world, the project was first started in LA, but finished in his native Australia, where he decamped as the COVID-19 pandemic began. Third record ‘Palaces’ sees this sound infused with something more, though. READ MORE: Five things we learned from our In Conversation video chat with Flume
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He’s known for left-field sounds that ping with electricity tracks that are meant to be heard on big, bassy festival sound systems in the early hours of the morning. For the past decade the artist – real name Harley Streten – has crafted fluorescent tunes that have won him a Grammy (second album ‘Skin’ took the trophy for Best Dance/Electronic Album at the 2017 ceremony) and helped him sell out venues across the globe. Flume has perfected his own brand of wonky electronic music.