Australia’s electronic golden boy Flume has been busy making the rounds on the Laneway Festival tour, giving him the chance to finally play his new material for home crowds and as the man himself tells it, reaction has been mixed.
As we previously reported, Flume is gearing up for the release of his eagerly anticipated sophomore full-length, which he’s titled Skin and packed with cameos from the likes of KUČKA, Vince Staples, and Kai.
The new material certainly retains the spirit of the old Flume, but has definitely been a curve ball for some fans who were expecting another ‘Holdin On’ and not an off-kilter future pop song like ‘Never Be Like You’, which is currently scaling the charts.
So what’s the reaction to the new tracks been like during the Laneway tour? “Some really got it and were really into, some were a bit confus[ed] but that’s good,” Flume, a.k.a. Harley Streten, told triple j‘s Matt & Alex this morning.
“It’s just a bit different; the beats flip up, it’s kind of complicated and it’s not festival music, it’s more headphone [music]. So some of it I think was pretty challenging and some of it went really well but overall I think it was a really good outcome.”
Skin still doesn’t have a solid release date, though Streten promises it will drop soon and that he’s got more up his sleeve for 2016, saying, “there’s lots of Flume to come out this year”.
“I guess I’m just kind of slow at making music,” he explained. “We were gonna do the album release earlier but then I was like ‘No, I want to hold back and get this awesome and get it right.’ [The] music’s done, it’s super-close to being done; I’m really happy with where it’s at.”
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Streten is now a hot commodity on the international festival circuit and part of the change in the producer’s sound could be attributed to the different locations in which the album was produced, such as in the back of moving vehicles.
According to Streten, ‘Smoke & Retribution’, his collaboration with KUČKA and Vince Staples, started in the back of a van on the way to a gig. “I started that beat in the back of a van on the way to Las Vegas,” he recounted.
Another track began in the back of a taxi in LA over a year ago. “It was just this minute-and-a-half thing and it didn’t go anywhere. It sounded really crazy because I was actually trying to play the part on my keyboard on the computer in the taxi,” said Streten.
“I kept going round corners and kept screwing it up then thought, ‘You know what? Screw it, I’m just gonna leave it like that. A year later I was working on this other tune and I was like, ‘oh it’s missing something – it needs something crazy to come in.'”
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“I ended up joining the two together and it’s kind of a cut n paste from different songs and that’s a new thing for me.” Apparently, the new workflow agrees with him: “It seems to work for me, I don’t know what it is.”
“I actually think it could be because of lack of pressure, because when I go into a studio I’m like ‘ok I gotta right something good’ but when I’m in the back of a car going from A to B, it’s like ‘ugh, I’ll just have a play around’ and it does seem to be when the good stuff happens these days.”
