walking upstream…
Flume
In a Sydney supermarket, a nine-year-old Harley Streten talked his dad into buying a Nutri-Grain cereal box because a promotional CD was tucked inside: a simple loop-based music program with a competition attached. "The whole concept of how music was laid out in layers... was really intriguing for me," he said. He kept splitting sound into layers for the next decade, bedroom-producing as Flume while waiting tables at a Hard Rock Cafe, until his 2012 self-titled debut outsold One Direction on the ARIA chart in its first week and turned an EDM-averse Australia into a wellspring of festival-ready producers. His catalogue fuses chopped hip-hop sampling, granular Los Angeles beat-scene sound design, and the filtered French house he grew up on into what one mentor simply called the Flume universe.
the sound in question
2016
Say ItFlume
walk the tributaries ↓
Flying Lotus2010s · Electronic / Nu jazz / Avant-hip hop / Wonky
By 2013 Streten was naming Flying Lotus in interview after interview as the point where his listening tipped from house and techno into something stranger: "finally it came to all the 'weird' shit like Flying Lotus and Shlomo," he told Fuse. Flying Lotus's Los Angeles beat scene treated a track less as a song than as a shifting mass of granular texture and warped low end -- a sound-design-first sensibility that shows up whenever Flume abandons a clean drop for glitching, tactile noise instead.
listen: upstream & heresource: Fuse — 'Who the F&^% Is Flume' and How Did He Beat One Direction on the Charts? (Flume's own account of his musical upbringing ↗
2010
Zodiac ShitFlying Lotus
2016
Space CadetFlume
listen forSet Flying Lotus's "Zodiac Shit" against Flume's "Space Cadet": both pile buzzing, detuned synth textures and drum hits that never quite line up into a dense, disorienting mass rather than a clean beat. Where a typical festival track resolves its tension into a drop, these two just keep mutating -- texture treated as the whole point, not a garnish on top of a hook.
J Dilla1990s–2000s · Hip hop / Instrumental hip hop / Neo soul / Jazz rap
Streten has been direct about the hip-hop side of his listening: "I'm a massive fan of J Dilla, instrumental hip-hop, Flying Lotus," he told Coup De Main in 2013, explaining why so much of his own catalogue skips vocals entirely. Dilla rebuilt sampled soul into a groove that sagged and lurched instead of marching in a straight line -- a rhythmic looseness Flume's own chopped, off-grid low end keeps chasing, track after track, without a rapper or singer required to carry it.
listen: upstream & heresource: Coup De Main Magazine — Interview ↗
2006
Time: The Donut of the HeartJ Dilla
2012
SleeplessFlume
listen forCue Dilla's "Time: The Donut of the Heart," built almost entirely from a chopped vocal loop that never quite lands on the beat, then Flume's "Sleepless": listen to how the vocal hook stutters and staggers against the drums rather than locking to them. Neither track resolves into a tidy four-on-the-floor pulse -- both let the sample's own imperfect timing drive the groove, the hallmark Dilla left instrumental producers chasing for two decades after Donuts.
Daft Punk1990s–2000s · House / French house / Electronic / Disco
Streten's account of his own listening history runs in a straight line from trance to "the whole French electronic thing of Justice and Daft Punk" to "I bought my best friend Homework when I was 9 years old," he told Fuse -- a specific, dated memory rather than a passing genre nod. Homework's filtered disco loops taught a generation of producers to treat a single chopped sample as the entire architecture of a track, a lesson audible whenever Flume locks a whole song around one warped, endlessly repeating hook.
listen: upstream & heresource: Fuse — 'Who the F&^% Is Flume' and How Did He Beat One Direction on the Charts? (Flume's own account of his musical upbringing ↗
1997
Around the WorldDaft Punk
2016
Say ItFlume
listen forDaft Punk's "Around the World" spins a single robotic bass phrase for six minutes, adding and stripping layers around it instead of writing a new part; Flume's "Say It" does the same trick with a heavily processed vocal hook, looping and filtering it until the repetition itself becomes the song's momentum. Neither song leans on a bridge or a middle eight -- the loop is the composition.