flakebelly

From the windswept landscapes of the Outer Hebrides, flakebelly shapes songs that wander between psychedelic indie rock, folk-jazz, and the ever-changing soundscapes of imagination. His music evolves in style and texture with each project, guided by a self-contained ethos that allows sound, tone, and method to develop freely.

His track In Parks Of Tall Trees was a first ripple from an avalanche of ideas, finding its way to Tom Robinson’s BBC 6 Music Introducing Mixtape. From first picking up a guitar in the late 90s and stumbling through formative songs in the early 2000s, flakebelly’s path has been one of constant diversion and reinvention. 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 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.”

Next came The Boy In The Diving Bell, a 17-track reckoning with past ghosts, unfinished business, and 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.

A new project, reaching its final stages and due for release next year, moves further into abstraction, focusing on tone, atmosphere, and structure. Each track is built from rhythm outwards - drums laid down before anything else is written - then opened out through layered drones, modal washes, and experimental harmonies. Sounds are pushed through tape machines, junked mixers and vintage outboard gear with vinyl fragments, warped loops, and degraded textures folded into the arrangements. The compositions are shaped largely free from conventional chord structures, allowing tonal colour, texture, and physical sound to guide the music. Some tracks are instrumental, while others feature vocals that form a subtle, cohesive thread across the album, hinting at a psychologically connected narrative.

True to his solitary instincts, flakebelly writes, records, and produces everything from his home studio, Flaming Jangle Studios. The result is music that feels lived-in and handmade - always evolving, never fixed, and forever searching for new shapes in the sound. Each project is a self-contained exploration, a long-form investigation into method, tone, and emotion, allowing flakebelly to continually reinvent his approach and maintain a music practice that is as exploratory as it is personal.