Flume Takes Audience by Electrical Storm

He is 20 years old, with light acne and hair that flops in his face, like many other 20 year-old boys. Except that this isn’t a normal college student we’re talking about; Harley Streten, better known by his stage name Flume, is an Australian R&B/techno artist who is slowly leaving his mark on multiple continents. On Thursday he certainly made his mark at Middlesex Lounge.

The Aussie-born producer got his start from a music kit in a cereal box at age 13. Since then, his mesmerizing single, “Sleepless,” has reached number one on Australian iTunes and has been featured in a variety of surfing-related videos on the Internet. His performance—while not without its rough patches—demonstrated a certain prowess for rhythmic understanding that is rare for someone so young, showing that he is destined to be more than a one-hit wonder.

The night didn’t start with Flume’s effortlessly infectious music, however. The three-hour space between when doors opened and when Flume arrived on the scene was occupied by two other artists signed under the Mmmmaven label: Coral Cola and Durkin. While neither band wields the same kind of star power as Flume, both were fitting transitions into the electronic instrumentals of the main act and had the crowd dancing without inhibition.

The nice thing about fans of an artist like Flume is that they are not afraid to dance. Distracting things like lyrics that might compete for one’s attention are a non-issue; there are only the beats to focus on. Rather, Flume and his predecessors ran into the opposite problem. The concert-goers were so into the music that they refused to stop ramming into his sound table, even when their antics threatened to kill the entire performance. His laptop and synthesizer were perched dangerously close to the raucous crowd, who were able to reach out and touch him due to the close quarters of Middlesex Lounge.

Clearly not meant for the kind of crowd drawn by an artist like Flume, the intimate setting was so packed that the line for the bathroom easily blended in with the rest of the crowd. The recently established club has minimal seating and lighting, fostering a dance-focused environment that was perfect for the crowd full of hip twenty-somethings.

Even for those not well versed in electronic music, Flume’s style has a certain universal appeal because of the mesmerizing quality of his repetitive riffs. Flume had a remarkable ability to read the crowd and gauge exactly how to get every person engaged (although this wasn’t difficult, considering how passionately everyone seemed to feel about his music). Even though his songs featured few lyrics, Flume’s fans seemed to anticipate every synthesized note.

The way that he transitioned between songs was flawless. At the end of “Holdin’ On” he built upon the song’s existing melody to create an entirely different rhythmic dimension not found on the album. During the climax of his song “Insane,” Flume raised his arms and closed his eyes like an orchestra conductor in a trance. Perhaps this was some indication of his up-and-coming mastery of the genre, but Flume still managed to maintain an incredibly humble presence, smiling quietly to himself and rarely speaking to the crowd.

However, despite Flume’s promising show of talent, his performance did not go off without a hitch. At one point an equipment malfunction caused the music to cut out completely, which definitely sapped the energy of the performance—if only temporarily. There were times when the repetitiveness of his songs needed to be interrupted as they stretched into monotony, and his performance ended rather anticlimactically without an encore. Still, the young performer with bad posture and a flair for beats certainly quenched the audience’s thirst for dancing on a Thursday night, giving Cambridge a taste of his promising musical career.