The Boy In The Diving Bell: A Sonic Exploration of Fragmented Consciousness

Flakebelly's The Boy In The Diving Bell is a profoundly introspective and boldly experimental opus, an ambitious project - conceived as the first part of a sequence of three interconnected albums - that interrogates the essence of memory, perception, and identity. At its core, the album is a collision of acoustic alt-folk and fractured psychedelia, with each element twisted and torn apart, as though pulled through a sonic wormhole.
 
Time itself becomes elastic here - warped, twisted, and shattered through live manipulations of a 1960's reel to reel tape machine, which is treated not merely as a recording device but as an instrument in its own right. Squelches, blurples & the occasional soul-rending screech, are coaxed from its mechanics by playing with the physical tape and manipulating the play, stop, rewind, and fast-forward dials in real-time. These live performances, recorded directly to the track, create ghostly echoes, cascading loops and unpredictable textures.

The album’s tracks weave between surreal brevity and expansive, hypnotic soundscapes. Ambient interludes of manipulated field recordings - wind through trees, mountain burns - are bent and layered into uncanny textures, creating what feel like "postcards from the inside out." These moments are punctuated by flourishes of finger-picked, lifelorn laments, their plaintive tones stretched into kaleidoscopic abstractions.

As a tapestry of alt-folk, lo-fi grunge, and experimental psychedelic sound design, The Boy In The Diving Bell is a singularity where time and sound collapse into pure expression. It resonates as a deeply immersive experience, a journey through the upside down, where acoustic sincerity is continually deconstructed and reassembled into something new.

This is not just music through the eye of a needle, it is a meditation on perception, a voyage through warped temporalities, and a bold reimagining of what music can become when pushed to the outermost limits. Flakebelly invites the listener to lose themselves in this fragmented, dreamlike world, where every note is both a memory and a revelation.

The Boy In The Diving Bell

It's Your Birthday

Buy on Bandcamp

I'm Finding It Hard (Demo v2)

Do You Know My Name?

CREATURE FEATURE (IT'SEATINGMEALIVE!)

Our special guests for this show are New York's own Queen Majesty & Barcelona-based Kaidara in anticipation of our upcoming takeover of the Nonstop series at Nowadays this Saturday!

https://www.instagram.com/planetgroovy
https://www.instagram.com/frikaan_time 
https://www.instagram.com/thequeenmajesty
https://www.instagram.com/kaidara_______ 
https://www.soundcloud.com/gggroovyyy
https://www.soundcloud.com/andrewakanbi
https://www.soundcloud.com/thequeenmajesty 
https://www.soundcloud.com/kaidara

GROOVY GROOVY with Akanbi feat. Queen Majesty & Kaidara @ The Lot Radio 08-15-2025

here's a couple of new songs. I hope you guys can enjoy them.

Switching Faces

10 Days With You

Playlist and other information available at: https://www.freeformfreakout.com/fffoxy-podcast-264/

FFFoxy Podcast #264

To Be Damned

The PSYCH WARD returned to Radio Alhara with its 19th episode on Wednesday 27 August 2025. Entitled ‘What Price Our Soul?’, the episode was packed, as always, with brilliant music from our growing international cast of inmates. We celebrated new songs by veteran collaborators and welcomed newcomers - all this while your host Agent X moaned about dead junkies, living legends, undead ghouls, and the challenge of playing videos on the radio. A chap named Paul Hewson was also mentioned (under his stage name, a mildly offensive four-letter word).

The lineup:
‘No Remorse’ by MEI feat. Artificial Comet
‘Trauma Town’ by Artificial Comet
‘Morast’ by Kombynat Robotron
‘Cha Cha Cha 2000’ by Prolapse
‘Freedom’ by Peyoti for President
‘Gutbucket’ by Hotboxgroove
‘Sauerstoff’ by Kombynat Robotron
‘Palestinian Children’ by Peyoti for President
‘Ring the Alarm’ by Bob Vylan
‘Aank’ by Kombynat Robotron
‘And to Him We Will Return (Grasping Air)’ by OOHS! & Dayin
‘Palestine (Fires of Gaza), PSYCH WARD version’ by European Space Agency

'PSYCH WARD 19, WHAT PRICE OUR SOUL'

Just want to make some music.

https://linktr.ee/foolhardymaybe

Instagram: foolhardymaybe

https://www.instagram.com/foolhardymaybe?igsh=MTB2bTR4aXR2NDA0cw%3D%3D&utm_source=qr

Guitar-driven DIY music from Hamburg – raw, honest, and dream-soaked. Northern melancholy meets danceable grooves. As rare as the animal, as distinct as the sound.

The European Space Agency releases on Bandcamp. This space is where I keeep all episodes of my radio show, the PSYCH WARD on Radio Alhara, and also an archive of recordings by my old band, the paperbax.

My name is Quentin. I started making beats around 2014. All tracks are programmed with stock instruments in Ableton Live 8 or 9.

Hearing advisory: This music includes very high pitched sounds and very low overblown bass. All distortion is fully intentional. I suggest turning up the volume to max so you hear it like I do (but do protect your ears)!

Influences: Oneida, The Beatles, Liars, Built to Spill, Flying Lotus, Michael Jordan, Frank Ocean, Jamila Woods, Mogwai, Japanese Breakfast, LCD Soundsystem, Kendrick Lamar, Acid Mothers Temple

Recommended if: Has psychic ills dreams, enjoys spending quality time with crazy music, takes bubble baths

Not Recommended if: Aversion to very high-pitched sounds, nerds, or bubble baths

John Treanor
Stephen Striegel
Paul Boutin
Courtney Davies
James Cooper
Phil Cobb
Nic Nifoussi

Free Form Freakout is a weekly radio show that plays a broad mix of popular and obscure music and produces bi-monthly podcasts focused on underground and experimental music. 

WORKING ON A FIFTH EP
ALL MY TRAFFIC IS ON STREAMING SERVS SO GO THERE LOL NOT TO MY DEMO DUMPING GROUND
UNLESS U REALLY LIKE FLAWED DEMOS
she hus foing it dor fun - kcashino

Indie, Acoustic & Psychedelic music from The Western Isles of Scotland.

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.

All socials: @flakebelly //

"Extensive and wildly eclectic sonic adventures" - Tom Robinson, BBC 6 Music

"flakebelly is ultimately the sort of the artist we need more of – a genuine weirdo-auteur carving his own path purely for the love of the game." - Lewis Wade, Is This Music?

"Refreshingly individual and very likeable" - Neil March, Trust The Doc Media

New tracks tagged #PSYCH ROCK