Harley Streten, aka Flume: from bedroom DJ to global star
He’s gone from making music on a laptop in his bedroom to global stardom. How did Harley Streten — aka Flume — do it?
The scene outside The Star casino in Sydney is everything you might expect of the 2017 ARIA music awards: stretch limousines pull up to the red carpet and disgorge long-haired dudes sporting Jesus beards, bad suits and mirror shades, trailed by personal video crews; feverish teenage girls press against the velvet rope to catch a glimpse of their heart-throb du jour, Harry Styles, resplendent in a purple paisley suit; the indie musician Kirin J. Callinan flips up his kilt to expose his genitals to the cameras, igniting a satisfying frisson of outrage. The biggest homegrown star in this firmament, meanwhile, is standing alone and unnoticed in a near-empty bar inside the casino, a tousle-haired 26-year-old in a claret-coloured suit and white sneakers nursing a champagne flute at four in the afternoon.
“I feel like going home and working on some music,” says Harley Streten, glancing towards the exit with a restless smile. “I’ve got this unfinished thing I’d really like to get back to.” According to his official ARIAs schedule, Streten is supposed to be stepping onto the red carpet about now, to pose for the television crews and shoot selfies with adoring fans. But delays have left him at a loose end, with five hours to go before he’s due onstage to present the award for Album of the Year. “Maybe I won’t have to do the red carpet?” he asks his road manager, Justin Basch, with undisguised hope.
Over the past 18 months, under his stage name Flume, Streten has performed to well over a million people across four continents. His second album, Skin, won Best Dance/Electronic album at the 59th Grammy Awards in Los Angeles last year and earned platinum status in six countries, including the US. His 2016 hit Never Be Like You has been streamed more than 380 million times on Spotify, and at the 2016 ARIAs he scooped up eight awards including Male Artist, Album, Producer and Independent Release of the year. As a remixer and collaborator he’s worked with a pop music Who’s Who that ranges from New Zealand prodigy Lorde to British singer Sam Smith to the hardcore US rappers Pusha T and Ghostface Killah. On his Facebook feed, young women demonstrate their devotion by posting selfies of their torsos tattooed with his album cover, accompanied by breathless declarations of lust.
If any of this has inflated Streten’s ego, he is keeping it well under wraps. His boyishness is accentuated by a wispy moustache — grown as a semi-ironic joke while on tour in Mexico — which could comfortably suit a 17-year-old. His mop of light brown hair is finger-combed, stiffened into place by salt from an earlier ocean dip at Manly. When I ask who designed his suit, he shoots me a sideways glance. “I should know that, but I don’t,” he admits sheepishly. (For the record: P. Johnson Tailors.) At tonight’s awards he’s nominated for Best Live Act — but until I congratulate him he’s oblivious to this fact. (“There’s been a lot going on.”) Even the 4pm glass of champagne is more a nerve-steadier than a sign of incipient hedonism.
At heart, Streten seems not so far removed from the musically obsessive kid he was not so long ago — a laptop beat-merchant from the northern beaches of Sydney who went global thanks to the radically decentralised music business of the new millennium. When word comes through from the ARIA awards organisers that he’s actually missed his big moment on the red carpet, the relief on his face is palpable. A quick mental calculation tells him that with five hours to go before he’s due on stage, he has enough time to hightail it back to his flat in Manly, go for a quick swim and flip open the laptop to work on some new music. Hell, he might even wash his hair.
So Flume heads for the exits and finds himself in an elevator with 68-year-old Daryl Braithwaite, former lead singer of the 1970s pop band Sherbet, who will later be inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame. The two men nod at each other, seemingly unable to put a name to the faces in front of them — a former King of Pop (1975-77) and a new princeling of dance music, famous 40 years apart. Then the lift opens, and Flume heads off to the beach.
Mosman High School, north Sydney, circa 2008: onstage in the school hall, 16-year-old Dave Le’aupepe is fronting a teenage band tearing into the 1970 Curtis Mayfield funk classic Move On Up; off to the side, on alto sax, is his mate Harley Streten, newly arrived at the school from the private Catholic college St Augustine’s. As school friends go, they make quite a contrast: Le’aupepe a leonine, long-haired Samoan-Australian from the western suburbs who will become famous as the tattooed frontman of the band Gang of Youths; and Streten, a skinny, baby-faced kid from the whitebread northern beaches who is, let’s just say …
“Super f..king nerdy,” confirms Le’aupepe, remembering that time. Which is no insult, he insists; it’s just that Streten was “really, really in-depth into electronic music” and the kind of arcane knowledge about nature and science that would find him quoting biologist Richard Dawkins in casual conversation. The funny thing in retrospect, he adds, is that Streten was so self-effacing, hardly anyone at school knew he was already on the cusp of something big, even in Year 11.
Nine years later, on the day before the 2017 ARIAs, Streten pulls up outside Mosman High in his sleek charcoal-grey Model S Tesla, one of the few flashy luxuries he’s acquired since fame and wealth came his way. Dressed anonymously in sneakers, a white T-shirt and a pair of beige chinos, he’s returning for the first time to participate in a student Q&A session alongside his old mate Le’aupepe, the other bona fide star of the HSC class of ’09. The feeling, he admits as he approaches the school gates, is “weird”. Barely more than a day earlier Streten had been in Los Angeles, overseeing the recording studio he’s building in a house he recently bought there; for two years he’s pursued an exhausting tour schedule that in the last few months alone took him through Britain, France, Belgium, Germany, Finland, Switzerland, South Africa and the US. Now here he is, saying “Hi Miss Wyatt!” as the school principal steps out from her office to give him a hug.
Le’aupepe is already here, looking the full Rock God in shades, black T-shirt and long black curls; when the old friends take their seats on the stage of the school hall, he slips easily into the role of flamboyant frontman, geeing up the crowd with freewheeling expletives and frank talk of his battles with alcohol and depression. Streten, meanwhile, sports a nervous smile and confesses to the crowd that public speaking is his idea of hell. Asked for advice on dealing with fame, he says it’s all about “controlling the ego”. When a student requests networking tips, he says: “Instead of networking, try not to burn bridges. Just be nice; if the art’s good, it will carry.” Afterwards, the girls flock around Le’aupepe while Streten positions himself off to the side, chatting to his old music teacher.
“Just be nice” may sound a tad simplistic as a career philosophy, but it’s perhaps the logical world-view of someone whose path to success has been preternaturally swift and drama-free. Even before he arrived at Mosman High as a 16-year-old, Streten was already making a name for himself as a bedroom DJ/producer, using electronic sampling and mixing software on his laptop to compose 120-beats-per-minute dancefloor “bangers”, which he posted on MySpace and Facebook.
He’d come of age just as electronic dance music was exploding into the genre known simply as EDM, when the laptop supplanted the guitar as the instrument of choice for many teenagers. The story is now legendary of how young Harley got his start as a DJ while still in primary school, when he wandered down the cereal aisle of a supermarket and noticed that a box of Nutri-Grain contained a giveaway CD-ROM of “Andrew G’s Music-Maker”, a primitive music-mixing program. The CD-ROM led him to the “mind-blowing” revelation that you could compose and record an entire piece of music without leaving your bedroom; by 10 he was already hooked on the repetitive futurism of techno music, with its layers of machinegun beats and sampled voices.
Streten’s father Glen, a former music and television producer, recalls that even as a small child his son had an uncannily alert ear for music and ambient sound. “He’d come into the room and say, ‘What’s that noise you’re making?’ and I’d realise he was talking about the buzz from the tubes in the television — he could hear it from another room.” The Stretens had enrolled their son in saxophone lessons but quickly realised that his real joy was toiling over his laptop creating the dance music he posted online under various DJ monikers — Harley Schoolkid, Hectic Sausage and HEDS. When Glen suggested one day that his son learn guitar, he earnt a rebuke. “He just looked at me and said, ‘Yeah dad, that’s just what the world needs — another guitar player’. I thought, ‘OK, I’ll f..k off.’ But it made me realise, ‘My God, this guy really has a focus on what he wants to do’.”
In 2006, Sydney DJ/producer Shawn Naderi stumbled across Streten’s music on MySpace and got in touch, ultimately becoming his mentor. “I was blown away that a 15-year-old was making that kind of music on a computer in his bedroom,” recalls Naderi. “Harley can pick up details in the music he’s sampling that others would pass over — like the rhythms of a singer, the space between breaths, whereas most producers would be focused on the lyrics and looking for the biggest hook.”
For digital natives like Streten and Naderi, technology had turned music into a playground of limitless possibilities. Internet file-sharing made most of recorded music accessible outside the control of record companies and copyright; DJ software and CD burners made it endlessly remixable and reproducible; MySpace, YouTube, Facebook and SoundCloud connected musicians directly to listeners. Music had “got free”, literally: Naderi and Streten gave away theirs online, inviting anyone to take it, sample it and mess around with it. By the time he graduated from high school, Streten was already getting work as a remixer and had written music for some of his dad’s television commercials. “Im an electro house producer/dj from Sydney,” he posted on Reddit. “I have just finnished [sic] school and im producing full time now trying to establish a name for myself and make a little cash … I also do some more chilled electronic stuff under the name Flume.”
Flume — a name cribbed from a song by Bon Iver — began as an experiment: the tempo was slower, the beats were broken up to mimic the lurching syncopation of hip-hop, the vocal samples were melodic but chopped and looped into otherworldly collages. “I loved the melodic chords and the euphoric side of trance,” recalls Streten, “but I hated the format — the kick-drums and the tempo; it was boring and done.” Among the first Flume tracks was Sleepless, a hypnotic slow-burner that mixed dissonant electronic sounds with eerie, wordless female vocals, like a melancholic ballad from another planet. The song got him signed to the small Australian electronic label Future Classic at 19, and within months it was being heard around the world in a promotional video for the surf brand Rip Curl.
“When Sleepless came out, everyone I knew from Mosman High was like: ‘What the f..k???’” laughs Dave Le’aupepe. “Harley was so unassuming, in the best possible way, that not many people from school even knew he played music, outside of being the dude who played sax. He was pretty introverted, which hasn’t changed, and a bit secretive about it. But he knew what he was doing.”
“At that time, hip-hop and electronic dance music were almost completely separate from each other,” recalls Naderi. “Those walls were eventually going to come down and Harley was definitely a catalyst for that. I remember early on I took Sleepless to a music business manager and told him: ‘You have to check this out; this is going to be the next thing’. He said it sounded cool, but he passed on it. Next thing I know, I’m sitting on a plane and they’re playing it as background music.”
The accelerated career arc of Flume is an object lesson in the way technology has up-ended the old rules of the music business. Even after he signed to Future Classic, Streten kept Sleepless available on SoundCloud as a free download as he built up his profile via Instagram and Facebook; by the end of 2011 the song had been played 350,000 times on YouTube and attracted rave reviews overseas. He composed and recorded his debut album on his laptop, either in his bedroom at home or while backpacking around Europe, layering beats and samples while sitting in German pubs, Spanish cafes and Amsterdam backpacker joints. Singers and rappers were enlisted for several tracks, including the New York rapper T.shirt, who laid down his verses remotely without ever meeting Streten. Released in late 2012, his debut studio album Flume topped the ARIA chart and scored its creator deals in the US and across Europe. Suddenly he was hot, and thousands of new-found fans wanted to see him on stage.
“The jump from just writing music by yourself, in your bedroom in your parents’ house on a shitty computer as a hobby, to a festival or a stage … it wasn’t something I felt natural with at all,” admits Streten. His earliest gigs as Flume were not much more than DJ sets by an anxious novice, such as his first venture to Perth in January 2012. “I slept on the couch at the promoter’s house,” he recalls. “I don’t think I really got paid, it was just the ticket over. A tiny venue, maybe 200 capacity. I was super nervous.” Six months later, his appearance at NSW’s Splendour In The Grass festival foretold what was to come: booked low on the bill because Sleepless was his only release, his early afternoon set ended with several thousand punters communing in a euphoric rave-up. By early 2013 he was playing 5000-capacity venues.
Streten admits that being onstage “freaks me out to this day”, but his transformation from stage-shy introvert to a massive festival drawcard has been as rapid as everything else about his career. In 2012 his stage set-up was a laptop, a mixer and a curtain backdrop emblazoned with his name; by early last year, as his second album Skin began climbing the US and European charts, he was touring with a crew of 16 and a set that featured back-projected animations, LED lighting rigs and a hexagonal glass performing dais. When he stepped out for the biggest show of the Skin tour, at the Lollapalooza festival in Chicago in July 2016, 70,000 people were waiting for him.
Streten has sometimes alluded to a period earlyin this rocket-ride when hubris got the better of him and “there was a lot that was on offer and a lot that was taken advantage of”, as he put it in one interview. His Instagram feed from 2013-14 captures the globetrotting whirl that followed the success of his first album, a blur of snapshots from hotel rooms, planes and crowded concert halls, annotated by increasingly deranged messages from female fans (“hi marry me”; “OMG I WIL TOUCH YOU”). A photo from a Las Vegas hotel balcony in 2014 shows Streten kneeling at the feet of two buxom babes in stiletto heels; it got 20,699 likes and the obligatory comments about Flume and his “bitches”.
Introverted he may be, but Streten is no more averse to female adoration than any other single 20-something pop star. When I ask him how he handles it, he laughs. “It’s great; it’s awesome. It’s not hard to deal with.” Friends say that away from the spotlight and media he can kick back and party, and his tour-rider includes generous provision for champagne, his preferred tipple. But after the initial success of Flume, the pressure for a follow-up induced a writer’s block that left him panicky enough to consult a psychologist. Eventually he broke the hoodoo by taking up meditation and sequestering himself away from the world on solo trips to the Tasmanian Wilderness and other remote locations. Skin was released in early 2016 and managed the neat trick of being both a bold creative jump and a wild commercial success.
Streten has said he named the album because he thinks of skin as “alien and kind of weird” but also “intimate and personal”, which is as close as he gets to revealing the more personal side of his art. Skin is surprisingly dark and jagged, throwing various singers — Beck, Raekwon, Tove Lo — into a disorientating soundscape in which the machines sometimes sound like they’ve gone haywire. The album’s striking cover image, of a flower resembling a string of DNA, is by the Australian artist Jonathan Zawada, whose work blurs nature and science to creepy but alluring effect.
“He was interested in getting at something darker … keeping people a little on edge,” Zawada says. “We used to talk about the process of how we work, how our tools are these perfect machines; they’re the things we’re most comfortable with, especially his generation, but then they fail, which in some ways reflects how the human condition is messier and dirtier and less controlled.”
Streten wasn’t sure how Skin would be greeted, but millennial pop fans evidently like things darker: the album went double-platinum in the US and vaulted Flume into the front ranks of EDM acts. Future Classic adroitly built on the success by licensing his music to selective marketing campaigns, lining up remix work and teaming him with rappers for one-off collaborations, which broke him into the US hip-hop market. The multimedia live Flume show, meanwhile, has played more than 140 shows around the world since early 2016, half of them major dance festivals. “We toured for nine months in 2016, which is crazy,” Streten says. “I went balls-deep, straight up. I was like: ‘OK, we’re going to do this’.”
Glen Streten recalls attending rehearsals that lasted from 10am to 4am. “I spent a couple of weeks with him in the US and walked away completely exhausted,” he says. But Streten Sr — who has helped his son manage his finances — believes that Future Classic’s canny strategy shows how social media and digital technology have enabled independent artists to thrive outside the old record company system, which often left them deeply in debt. “I said to him early on, ‘Let me have a role in the first three years of your success, and I’ll set you up’. And that’s where he’s at now. If he never puts out another song, he doesn’t have to worry about money.”
For Streten, the future is centred around Los Angeles, where he is designing his new home and studio as a place for other musicians and artists to drop in and collaborate, an antidote to the isolationism of the bedroom DJ. The snippets of new music he has released on social media are set to stark urban videoscapes, and it’s not hard to foresee him leaping beyond the strictures of dance music. Film soundtracks are one avenue Streten talks about, and Zawada has become a key collaborator since the pair worked together on the Skin album and show. They have discussed pushing their ideas outside the conventional concert format and into the more immersive realm of virtual reality, although Streten is circumspect about discussing it further. “We’ll see what’s next,” he says guardedly. “But we’re going to create a world of stuff.”
When Streten attended last year’s Grammy Awards in Los Angeles, he took along his dad and Shawn Naderi, the mentor who had helped launch his career more than a decade earlier, and with whom he still shares a studio in Sydney. The extra ticket for Naderi was hard to get, but Streten insisted on it — those early connections run deep for him, a grounding against the thin oxygen of fame. “You know how people say a career like this changes you?” he says. “I can totally see how that could happen. But I’ve got really good people around me and friends who’ll slap me …” Dave Le’aupepe recalls that when he turned up to the London launch of Skin in 2016, he was surprised to see that Streten had invited every Mosman High expat he could find.
On the night of the 2017 ARIAs, Streten gets back to The Star in time for dinner and the main show, having taken that quick dip at Manly and worked a bit more on his music. Accompanying him is a guy dressed in casual office clothes and carrying a small backpack, an incongruous outfit amid the glitzy dresses and dinner suits. He introduces himself as Streten’s oldest friend — they’ve known each other since they were four. Streten had called him out of blue and invited him down to the ARIAs, so he’d arrived straight from his office job, and now he’s tagging along as his old mate does the pop star thing.
At 9pm, Streten goes onstage to present the Album of the Year award alongside DJ Zane Lowe. In rehearsals they’d been encouraged to improvise some casual banter as Lowe read out the nominees, but Streten characteristically just rips open the envelope to announce the winner. It’s Go Farther in Lightness by Gang of Youths, the band fronted by his old schoolfriend Dave Le’aupepe, who strides up to the stage with his band mates to accept the statuette. Mosman High is in the house!
Backstage afterwards, the two men share a tight hug and Le’aupepe mists up a bit. Later they’ll go partying, and then Harley Streten will go back to work — concerts in Japan, Singapore, the Philippines, Thailand and Indonesia, and then a back-to-back run of four Falls Festival shows across four Australian states to end the year. His final Facebook selfie is the image of a puffy-eyed young guy who needs a long, long holiday.