flakebelly

Hidden away in the windswept landscapes of the Outer Hebrides, flakebelly shapes songs that wander between psychedelic indie rock, folk-jazz, and the quiet strangeness of the everyday. Acoustic warmth, blues-stained guitars, jazz-streaked piano, and dreamlike textures fold into each other, creating music that drifts between clarity and haze.

His track In Parks Of Tall Trees found its way to Tom Robinson’s BBC 6 Music Introducing Mixtape, a small ripple in what has become a steady tide of restless ideas. From first picking up a guitar in the late 90s and stumbling through those formative songs in the early 2000s - many of which later resurfaced on Apprentice Green - flakebelly’s path has been one of constant diversion and reinvention. The early singles collections - The Orkney Tapes (2022) and The Christmas Morning Outcome (2023) - were restless, experimental documents of sound-searching, sketchbooks where ideas were tested, broken apart, and pieced together again in the pursuit of a voice. Those experiments fed directly into the indie-folk EP Behaviours (2022), the rough-edged Lo Fidelity (2024), and the kaleidoscopic album Apprentice Green (2024), described by SNACK Magazine as “like being Alice in Wonderland, transported through a maze of moments in flakebelly’s imagination.”

Now comes The Boy In The Diving Bell - out now - a 17-track reckoning with past ghosts, unfinished business, and the fragments of memory that refuse to settle. It is a psych alt-folk soup of acoustic laments, fractured tape loops, and warped dreamscapes. Much of the sound was dragged through the teeth of a battered 1960s reel-to-reel, used not as a recorder but as an instrument - reels halted, jolted, rewound, coaxed into blurples, screeches, and ghostly echoes. Mistakes are left in, first takes are preferred, imperfections celebrated. The result is an antidote to the sterilised sheen of digital perfection and the creeping spread of AI-reproduced music: deliberately irregular, defiantly human. In keeping with that spirit, the album is not available on Spotify or Apple Music. It lives on Bandcamp, CD, and vinyl, with a single concession to SoundCloud’s chaos.

The Boy In The Diving Bell is only the beginning - the first of three interconnected albums, the demos for which are already written. Yet even as that arc unfolds, flakebelly has begun detouring into a very different landscape: a new project built from vinyl samples, drum loops, and dirty guitars driven through vintage outboard gear, cassette recorders, and battered mixers. It is dark, abrasive, and deliberately uncomfortable - sound pushed to the point of collapse, distorted tape glued together with transformer saturation, live mixes through old delay units, dials twisted until frequencies scream. If The Diving Bell trilogy is haunted by memory, this parallel work dives into raw sound destruction and the strange beauty of degradation.

True to his solitary instincts, flakebelly writes, records, and produces everything from his home studio. The result is music that feels lived-in and handmade - always shifting, never fixed, and forever searching for new shapes in the sound.