A quick chat with Flume

I’m writing this in Berlin’s Neukölln district, in a place called Melbourne Canteen. I’m drinking a Flat White and trying to fight a cold, while in Australia it’s summer now…a bit hard to comprehend. There are a lot of interesting projects coming from Down Under recently, with Anklepants being perhaps the most visually impressive. There is also a constant moaning among my Australian friends about how boring their country is, culturally speaking. I sat down with young producer Flume to discuss this.

How is the scene in your hometown of Sydney?

There is no scene for what I do, not for all the beatsy weird stuff. But now I started to have a some success in Australia, there is a few others coming up. One of them is Ta-Ku  or Chet Faker. Essentially it’s not very big yet, but I think over the next few years there will be quite a strong electronic music scene in Australia. You guys were one of the first German press who where covering me. That was maybe a year ago, when the sleeper thing just begun.

It’s very commercial, there’s not a huge amount of clubs if you want techno. Here there’s a different club for almost any electronic genre, but Australia it’s not like that. There’s also a lot of ‘radio music’ in clubs. It’s really nice to come over here and explore, it’s kind of like a playground out there for me. I can hear all this music I listen to on my iPod that’s much harder to find in Australia— unless a particular act is touring.

What’s on you iPod right now?
I’ve been listening to some Captain Murphy, some ShadowChild. Lots of Freddy Gibbs, the rapper from the US. I’ve been listening to his stuff a lot. Some more trappy stuff.

Are you into trap?
I actually quite like it, but I feel it’s gonna get rinsed pretty soon. When I first heard that stuff – for me Hudson Mohawke‘s TNGHT EP is my favorite release of 2012 – but there is so much bad trap music around and it’s always same same same. I like Baauer, but that’s about it. I feel like if it’s done right, then it’s amazing. I actually have another project called What So Not where we are doing forward-thinking trap stuff.

How did the album come together?
This Flume thing was always just my experimental side project I never really thought much of it, but once Future Classics signed Sleepless I realized “maybe this Flume thing has some potential, maybe people will like it”. A lot of the tracks I wrote in Europe on my laptop when I was traveling with a friend. In fact “More Than You Thought” and “Bring You Down” I wrote here in Berlin. One was written in a pub. Coffee gets my creativity going so I thought maybe I’d get an Irish coffee, because I never had one before. It was fucking horrible, it was the worst thing I ever had but then a really great song came out of it.

What cities inspired the other tracks?
“Syntra” is from Portugal, that’s named after my favorite town there. It got like this huge cave structures, it’s a bit surreal and almost looks like something out of Lord Of The Rings. And “Left Alone” I wrote in a Cafe in Barcelona, it just came out one day. “Star Eyes” was in Amsterdam.

Star Eyes…
That was the only one! I swear! I’m not really good at writing songs when I’m on something…unless it’s caffeine.~
[soundcloud url=”http://soundcloud.com/futureclassic/flume-star-eyes-1″]

Flume’s selftitled debut album will be released on February 22 on Trangressive Records.

Published January 28, 2013. Words by Michael Aniser.