While the feat is by all means impressive, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who has seen Flume at one, or many, of his omnipresent-level appearances at our country’s biggest music festivals. Streten pinpoints last year’s Splendour In The Grass as the moment where things began to get crazy.
“Things have been going on the rise for so long that it’s insane. The craziest part was doing my first proper festivals, encountering my first fans. That’s when my mind was going, ‘Holy shit. What is going on?’ It was that Splendour thing. It’s not so much that I’ve made it, because I still don’t feel like I’ve made it. But it was Splendour when I thought that shit was getting serious, that this was something I’m going to be doing for a while,” Streten beams.
Producing for a number of years under various projects, Streten struck gold with the pulsing electronica featured on Flume’s debut EP. “I wrote all the Sleepless EP tracks in a week, just with a creative burst. I didn’t know whether they were any good or not, you can never tell if your own tracks are good. I wasn’t really sure if people would be into it. It wasn’t until [Sydney label] Future Classic got onto it that I realised the Flume thing had potential, and I realised that this is the sound I should go for. Then I just experimented,” he recalls. “The songs on the album are quite a bit different than the EP too. I think of it as Harley music, rather than Flume music – the music my brain wants to make.”
Despite Flume exploding globally, Streten still manages to strike the balance with his other concurrent projects – evident at the time of our interview. “It’s fucking hard man. I’ve actually got a What So Not (Harley’s project with fellow Sydney product Emoh Instead) remix open at the moment. Here’s my situation in LA: we’ve got this remix for Calvin Harris and Example that they want us to do. So I’ve come up with this thing in the past few days, and set aside some time today, but fucking waddaya know, Skrillex wants to hang out today. I can’t say no to that. So I’m going to go around to his house after this and hang for a bit, then I’ve got two hours to work on the remix, then grab dinner and head to the gig. Literally all my time is either taken up by press, gigs or music. But that’s cool, it will be nice to get time off to focus on both projects and be creative again.”
Deftly navigating trends in electronic music, Streten now finds himself as somewhat of a conduit for Australian music fans’ exposure to global movements. “I do take notice of trends, and I do like some of the trap stuff that’s coming out at the moment. It’s not so much Flume, but What So Not as an ambassador for trap in Australia. We just did three weeks of heavy touring around Australia, playing half trap, half 128 sets, and the kids were going nuts for the trap music,” he reveals.
While Flume’s success has been tremendous and rapid, Streten won’t be coasting off the spoils of victory anytime soon. “I don’t see writing music as a work thing. I look forward to it, it’s a fun thing for me. I get so much pleasure and joy out of it. I just want to keep writing music. I’ve got this kind of sound and people are into the music, but I don’t want to write another record that caters to that sound. I feel that with the first record I tested a lot of people that wouldn’t really be into the genre, and pushed the musical boundaries a little bit for a lot of people. I want to not play it safe and hopefully do it again with the next bunch of releases I do,” Streten forecasts. “I feel like we’ve got Australia on lockdown, but now it’s time to spread out to Europe and the US. Just make this thing as big and good as possible.”
BY LACHLAN KANONIUK
