After finding a music-making program in a cereal box at the age of 11, Harley Streten – aka Flume – discovered a passion that’s seen him emerge as one of electronic music’s brightest talents. Building on the underground success of his 2012 debut album, the sharp-dressing Sydneysider recently released Skin, a follow-up record that pulls in an impressive list of collaborators – including Beck, Little Dragon and Raekwon – and seen his shimmering take on dance music crack America and beyond.

Marking just how far he’s come in the industry, Streten took ‘sketches’ for the songs that would later end up on Skin out to Los Angeles and the album took shape as he roped in an A-list line-up of musicians to help supply the vocals. Finding new sounds is a key part of Streten’s approach and informs the music he produces. “I’ll spend days just working on creating new sounds that I then store away,” he says. “Then, when I feel inspired I’ve got all these places to start from – it’s like my ammunition.”

Back in the early days, he’d trawl Napster for his inspiration. “I was listening to lots of really bad trance music,” he says. “I had no money to buy records so I’d go on music-sharing sites and I guess they were my equivalent of Soundcloud. I had access to a whole world of music for zero dollars, which gave me a lot of my inspiration and formed my music knowledge.”