Flume, the project of Australian producer and dj Harley Edward Streten (1991),
pioneered the genre of "future bass".
He operated at the border of house music, hip hop and pop on his debut album Flume (2012) and relied massively on the method of chopping the vocals
and shifting their pitch.
The "calm" songs include Sintra, that chops up both the vocals and the beat;
Sleepless, with the most surreal effect of chopped-up vocals (Jezzabell Doran's vocals);
and the instrumental Ezra, in which the synth acts like a jazz trumpet.
Space Cadet fails to bridge neosoul and rap,
and the languid ballad Left Alone sounds trivial,
but, at the other end of the spectrum,
More Than You Thought, with its
android wonky beat, African chants and monster synth distortion, is emblematic
of Flume's complex architectures.
Hence the most adventurous songs:
Holdin On (the "future bass" prototype) weds gospel-soul fervor and dramatic keyboard stabs;
On Top pits Los Angeles rapper's T Shirt
against a distorted organ and a dense beat;
Stay Close is a duet between a male voice and a "chipmunk" voice over dejected synth lines;
and, best of all,
sensual female vocals (Moon Holiday) intone a poppy melody over a
Jamaican rhythm in Insane.
Unfortunately, the songs get less and less interesting towards the end.
The last four or five could have been trimmed out.
The came the three-song EP Lockjaw (2013)
Drop the Game
What About Us
This Song Is Not About a Girl
and, above all, came
Flume's remix of British duo Disclosure's You & Me (2013),
which became the first hit of future bass and created the genre's standard, a
chilled-out form of trap and dubstep.
Flume was also half of the duo What So Not with Australian producer Christopher "Emoh Instead" Emerson, whose electro-house song High You Are, off their EP The Quaker (2013), was remixed by New York producer Sam "Branchez" Kopelman to become a classic of future bass.
Flume's
Skin (Future Classic, 2016) was a more commercial effort that used the
same techniques in a more cohesive manner and emphasized the melodies.
Hence the his biggest hit Never Be Like You, a straightforward dance-pop
number sung by Canadian contralto Kai (Alessia De Gasperis-Brigante);
the inferior Say It, which sounds like Kate Bush gone hip-hop;
and the stately litany Tiny Cities sung by Beck over a wavering electronic tapestry.
This time flume rarely challenges the listener.
Notable exceptions are the
six-minute Innocence, possibly the baroque peak of his arrangements
(Aluna Francis is the singer but one hardly notices her),
and Numb & Getting Colder, which extracts
the mellow pitch-shifted chant of Kucka (Australian producer Laura-Jane Lowther)
from a chaotic, abrasive soundscape worthy of
Flying Lotus.
The instrumentals are largely pointless, and
the rap songs Lose It (Vic Mensa), Smoke & Retribution (Vince Staples), and You Know (Raekwon) are also the worst.
Despite the fact that Skin had plenty of fluff, Flume released also
a Skin Companion EP I, recorded from the same sessions that yielded Skin, containing more fluff.
The mixtape Hi This Is Flume (2019) suffered from the same disease:
most of the music was gratuitous.
One can salvage the metallic synth melody of Jewel,
the way Is it Cold in the Water chops up and rudely deconstructs a simple lullaby,
and the way
Dreamtime sets in montion a whirlwind of mildly distorted electronics coupled with ethereal female humming. The collaborations are mostly disappointing,
in particular
the trivial
Voices with Sophie.
