Guests, gear, and that car. Flume goes deep on it all.

Released with only 24hrs notice and busting a two-year music drought, Flume's surprise mixtape Hi This Is Flume is 38 minutes of mind-warping beats and creative collaborations that sounds like one of Australia's most celebrated producers carving out his post-Skin career path in real-time.

From its lack of radio-friendly singles, to the spontaneous shifts in sound and bizarre song titles that have become memes, the mixtape doesn't seem destined to win ARIAs and Grammys like his Hottest 100 dominating second album did. But that's the point.

It's a decidedly weirder, more experimental turn that might blow the minds of casual fans, bridging the gap between populist bangers and the stranger, electronic fringes that inspire Flume - artists like Flying Lotus, Oneohtrix Point Never, and Arca.

"I hope it opens up people to more left-field electronic music," says Harley Streten, aka Flume. He's probably also giving a bunch of listeners their first taste of Slowthai, JPEGMAFIA, Eprom, and SOPHIE.

Speaking to triple j on the eve of releasing new single 'Friends', we picked Harley's brain about the mixtape's cast of collaborators. Here's what we learned...

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He was big on Slowthai before he blew up

The first voice heard on Hi This Is Flume (besides Harley's multi-tracked intro, of course) belongs to Slowthai - the 23yo rapper who made the BBC Sound of 2019 with abrasive rap tunes like 'T N Biscuits'.

"As soon as I heard it I was like, 'I need to track him down, I wanna work with this guy'," explained Harley, who discovered Slowthai "pretty early on. At that stage, he didn't have much of a following - maybe 2,000 Instagram followers." He's now got a healthy 95,000.

Their resulting collab 'High Beams' was recorded on the rapper's home turf. "I actually went over to the UK, to work with a couple of people, and we just got in the studio. He was great to work with, super-talented, super-amazing. He's got such a unique voice."

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He had a ball with JPEGMAFIA

"He's one of my favourite people to work with," Harley said of JPEGMAFIA. "On top of being an amazing rapper, he’s got chops when it comes to production. So when he’s got an idea, we can communicate really well. Awesome dude."

The Baltimore MC delivers some sinister bars on 'How To Build Relationships' before providing one of the mixtape's most beautifully spontaneous moments when he, and everyone in the studio, bursts into laughter at his redundant delivery: 'Don't call me unless I gave you my number.'

"That’s just one take of him talking shit," Harley explains. "What happened was, he did the first part of the track... [Then] that new drum beat that comes through... Once the original beat comes back in, he was like ‘You want me to do another verse?’"

"I said ‘You know what, why don’t you just talk shit for the rest of it?’ He goes ‘Alright, I’m great at that! ...The whole thing just came together so easily and naturally in one day.”

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JPEGMAFIA also enjoys geeking out with Flume over the new tech filling up the Aussie producer's L.A. studio. "Every time he comes around, we just mess around on all the hardware; for an hour and just record everything, chop it up."

Where Harley used to enjoy toying with "in-the-box" software on his laptop, lately he's been messing with hardware, like the Roland TR-8 drum machine and the new Prophet X sampler/synthesizer.

"It’s always more fun making stuff tactile, twisting knobs and fiddling with things is more human. I’m trying to force myself to step away from the screen a bit and it’s been really productive."

He's in awe of SOPHIE's sounds

The leftfield Scottish producer appears twice on the mixtape: Firstly, Flume puts his spin on SOPHIE's 'Is It Cold In The Water?', then the pair cross-pollinate on 'Voices', with a topline from Flume regular Kučka.

The latter collaboration actually dates back to Flume's 2017 tour behind Skin. "When I played at Melbourne’s Sidney Myer Music Bowl with Vince Staples, Kučka, and SOPHIE, we hired out a studio because we had a couple of dates [in town] there."

"I was just hanging out with her, SOPHIE, and said 'You’ve got the craziest sounds. Can you just play some of them? And I’m going to record everything’. So, she just started making sounds."

She has this little box with knobs on it. It’s this Elektron FM Synth and she’s just mastered it [and] can just make the most absurd sounds from it, so effortlessly. I basically just sampled her thing and crafted that beat [for ‘Voices’]."

On reuniting with visual genius Jonathan Zawada

Arguably the mixtape's biggest and most important collaborator is Jonathan Zawada. He designed the sleeve for Hi This Is Flume and created the accompanying visualiser, which was filmed in Western Australia over a couple of weeks.

Having done all the visuals for Skin - including album and single artwork, touring graphics, even stage design - Harley says extending his partnership with Zawada was a no-brainer. "We are on the same page with everything. He did such an amazing job.”

The resulting imagery is a fascinating counterpart to Flume's inventive sounds, from scenes of Flume following his own doppelganger across sand dunes or digging him out of oily earth, to the driver's eye view of a road that appears to loop into infinity as dinosaurs and police cars float overhead.

One memorable shot during 'Vitality' features candy melting on the dashboard under the desert sun, ensnaring a greedy fly in its droopy ooze downward. "[Zawada] got really excited when he found that. He called me 'I got this shot! It’s amazing!'"

It matches the music's juxtaposition of mechanical and organic sounds; reminiscent of the meditative, surreal movie experiences provided by Ron Fricke's Baraka and Samsara, a touchstone in Flume and Zawada's creative conversations.

"We weren’t sure whether to make it a strong narrative thing and have subtitles. Because how do you make something that’s 40 minutes interesting? Well, Samsara was interesting and that had absolutely no plot. It’s quite loose and just beauty in interesting images. That was a conversation we had, for sure.”

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He loves that car as much as you do

Stealing the show as the star of the Hi This Is Flume artwork and visualiser is the vehicle Flume cruises around in: a '90s era Nissan 300ZX.

Covered in mis-matched neon panelling, the car comes with a pre-decorated interior best described as 'neon hippy techno' chic. There's mess - a tangle of wires, empty cans and snack wrappers - that makes it look lived in, but also creatively curated knick knacks, like a neon-lit USB fan, a rock crystal lamp, and an automated toothpick dispenser.

"We just brainstormed over a lot of phone calls back and forth: coming up with ideas, things to do in the car, what would happen. It’s all Jonathan’s creation and his aesthetic put into a car.”

So where is the vehicle (that some fans have dubbed 'Wormhole') located now? "It’s in Sydney somewhere - I wanna ride around in it. It’s f**king great. We’re going to do something with it..."