![]() “It allows me to take all the room down the bottom, all the bass and low-mids. Harley gravitates towards female singers “mainly because of where the vocal sits,” he says. On Palaces, almost all the featured artists are female. When I find these people, some of them end up being lifelong collaborators.” “Now I think about it, we always do stuff. “She’s been on so much stuff,” he continues, chuckling. For instance, he has worked with Kučka on three projects now – Skin, Palaces and 2019’s mixtape Hi, This Is Flume – and says he adores her “alien, sexy space lady, vocal tone”. Harley finds comfort in bouncing ideas off other artists, either remotely or at the studio. The next day, you’re like, ‘I fucking suck, I made that one good thing, it’ll never happen again’.” Image: Zac Bayly for MusicTech ![]() One day, you’re like, ‘I did this amazing song, this is gonna be great’. And being a solo producer, it’s always a mental battle. “I’m quite a neurotic person I put pressure on myself. “I wasn’t feeling particularly creative,” he tells us. Living out of the city and in rural Australia offers a break from the “fast-paced life” and gives Harley the “simple, wholesome existence” he’s always wanted. The subtropical area Harley moved to is where he gathered foley recordings for Palaces. He moved to the countryside, just down the road from his creative partner on the Flume project, Jonathan Zadawa, who has been working with Harley since before Skin, in 2015. In 2020, Harley returned to Byron Bay, Australia, feeling uninspired after some time in California. The album came together in Australia and I wanted to incorporate my environment into the music because it was such a scatter of from different years and different times.” ![]() “I put all the pieces of the puzzle together and was able to dig into some sketches and complete them. Even though each track has its own distinct flavour, the producer sees Oz as the thread that ties the album together. You’ll hear the faint singing of birds in the introduction of the title track and subtle field recordings sprinkled throughout. Those might be my two favourite things.” Image: Zac Bayly for MusicTechīuried in the foliage of Palaces’ meticulously crafted sonics are ambient sounds of Flume’s homeland. And then the Prophet X, which is not just a synth, it’s a ROMpler – you’ve got your strings and voices and all that. “Everything about it: the sounds, the fact it has no effects, it’s just pure synth I adore that. “The Prophet-10 is the most beautiful synth,” he continues. I’ll record myself messing around for 20 minutes then I’ll use software to cut up the sounds and warp them and take it from there. I treat my modular synths like a guitar pedal effects rack. “I have modules that do things I can’t do on a computer. “I’ve gone down the modular hole,” he says, with a laugh. It’s only recently that he started experimenting with hardware instruments. Harley happened across plenty of DAWs and plug-ins to help him build on his Music 2000 masterpieces. ![]() In the 2000s and early 2010s, online file-sharing was rife and software piracy was near impossible to prevent. Harley mastered his craft during a worrying time for software developers. I’d come home from school and hop on my cracked DAW. I came back a week later and he gave me a demo CD of his music and another CD. “He was like, ‘If you want to come back next week, I’ll burn you a CD-ROM full of cracked music-making software’. “I went to a video game store and asked, ‘Do you have any music-making games?’ The guy recommended eJay,” he tells us, the 1997 music game for Microsoft Windows. The game whet his appetite for beatmaking. You can make music on PlayStation?’” he says. Harley started producing electronic music at the age of 10 after discovering the 1999 music-making PlayStation game, Music 2000. That was a huge moment to be able to say, ‘I quit’.” “And then, when my first EP came out as Flume – I was making other music before that but more clubby stuff – the ball started rolling, and I started to get gigs. “I used to work at Hard Rock Cafe as a waiter and I fucking hated that job so much,” he continues. “The first moment of being able to fully support myself, financially, from just making music was very cool,” he says. Instead, it’s when he realised that Flume was a sustainable full-time project. Harley’s most memorable moment of his 11-year-long career isn’t a release or award. “When I feel like I’ve got a strong body of work, I’ll just put it out.” “No, I just make stuff and it comes out when it comes out,” he says. Though Palaces comes 10 years after his debut, Harley isn’t celebrating this anniversary with a third album. By the time his second album, Skin, dropped in 2016 with features from the likes of Vince Staples, Beck and AlunaGeorge, the scene had their ears locked on Flume’s frenzied productions.
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