Apprentice Green. The name of my student band all those moons ago. Around 2003 or so I demoed a bunch of songs, the first I had written way back when in the misty mists of time, when I was but a short-trousered wee nipper. A hoarder at heart, I've held on to those demos like tattered bits of string, lumping them from place to place and filling many a kitchen drawer with one-day-surely-to-be-useful sketches.

Toiling alone in the home studio from October 2022 to February 2023. Recording. Mixing. Mastering. 4 months to reckon with a lifetime of threads. 4 months to re-tool half-remembered tunes, to scaffold scantily clad melodies & re-flesh the uncloseted skeletons of unfinished business.

It is unashamedly psychedelic. Rocky, folksy, jazzy, shoegazy & sometimes just plain weird. But always, I hope, beguiling, bewitching & bewildering.

It starts with a breath in and ends with a breath out.

37 & one half minutes. 10 songs.

Bandcamp

Apprentice Green

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.

Buy me!

The Boy In The Diving Bell

flakebelly // sexy zeppelin

Presave for streaming: https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/flakebelly/sexy-zeppelin

A laid-back take on the classic rock genre. With hypnotic drums, pumping melodic bass, palm muted bluesy guitars and a heartfelt plea for understanding. Complete with bonus Michael Jackson-inspired coda. With smoothness. With style. Sexy Zeppelin.

(P) 2022 flakebelly - all rights reserved
(C) 2022 flakebelly - all rights reserved

https://linktr.ee/flakebelly

twitter - https://twitter.com/flakebelly

instagram - https://www.instagram.com/flakebelly/

spotify - https://open.spotify.com/artist/3GqvNO9hh3uHjhvmQpg5rU

apple music - https://music.apple.com/gb/artist/flakebelly/1531465247

bandcamp - https://flakebelly.bandcamp.com/releases

amazon - https://music.amazon.com/artists/B08HXPSWF8/flakebelly

soundcloud - https://soundcloud.com/user-526418027

reverbnation - https://www.reverbnation.com/flakebelly

drooble - https://drooble.com/flakebelly

Sexy Zeppelin

flakebelly // 3 little rooms

out 26th September: https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/flakebelly/3-little-rooms-2

A blend of laid-back indie-pop and jazz with a lo-fi feel, a looped rhodes piano and a drum break. Delicate slide guitars counterpointing jazzy piano chords. A harmonious symphony resonating with the belief that, despite the uncertainties of life, everything will be alright.

https://linktr.ee/flakebelly
https://songwhip.com/flakebelly

(P) 2023 flakebelly - all rights reserved
(C) 2023 flakebelly - all rights reserved

3 Little Rooms

flakebelly // long, it goes over again

Drums tumble in a surrealistic ballet, cascading like erratic heartbeats, as the indie rock spirit pirouettes on the precipice of a psychedelic unknown.

A home-made indie track, flirting with dadaist poetry, the tale of a girl's struggle for meaning in the world and a pilgrimage through the labyrinth of the human condition. Keyboards, drums & bass cast us into a surreal twilight zone where happiness is a ghost of the midnight hour.

https://linktr.ee/flakebelly
https://songwhip.com/flakebelly

(P) 2023 flakebelly - all rights reserved
(C) 2023 flakebelly - all rights reserved

Long, It Goes Over Again

flakebelly // the christmas morning outcome

Out 12th December
Pre-save: https://hypeddit.com/6go6mf

A sonic voyage through the multiverse, a dimensional portal to alternate realities where the rules of music and genre are constantly shifting and evolving. A call to arms and a rallying cry against psychic vampires and negativity.

https://linktr.ee/flakebelly
https://songwhip.com/flakebelly

(P) 2023 flakebelly - all rights reserved
(C) 2023 flakebelly - all rights reserved

The Christmas Morning Outcome

Buy Me!

flakebelly // Where I Get It From (Elliott Smith) - Live! In The Attic

Where I Get It From - written by Elliott Smith when he was in Junior High. Yikes. I mean, save some songwriting skills for the rest of us Elliott.

https://linktr.ee/flakebelly
https://songwhip.com/flakebelly

Where I Get It From (Elliott Smith) - Live! In The Attic

flakebelly // in parks of tall trees

Dive into the psychedelic realm of "In Parks of Tall Trees" - an auditory trip that defies explanation. Backwards piano chords weave with poems of dreams, accompanied by a heartbeat of furious drums. Piano riffs masquerade as bass guitars as solipsistic organs take center stage.

https://linktr.ee/flakebelly
https://songwhip.com/flakebelly

(P) 2024 flakebelly - all rights reserved
(C) 2024 flakebelly - all rights reserved

In Parks of Tall Trees

In Parks Of Tall Trees

Say Yes (Elliott Smith) // live! in the attic

https://linktr.ee/flakebelly
https://songwhip.com/flakebelly

Say Yes (Elliott Smith) - Live! In The Attic

flakebelly // with knowing

https://flakebelly.bandcamp.com/album/lo-fidelity

https://linktr.ee/flakebelly
https://songwhip.com/flakebelly

(P) 2024 flakebelly - all rights reserved
(C) 2024 flakebelly - all rights reserved

Lo Fidelity

With Knowing

flakebelly // lazy afternoon

It was only yesterday, I remember it all so clearly now. As I walked alone along the weed grasped towpaths of my youth, beside the shopping trolley waters, misty eyed as otters frolicked amongst their prophylactic buoyancy aids, Lo! a man appeared upon a flaming pie and said, "a single will you make, a smorgasbord of sounds & styles, a token of onanistic glee. This must you present in handy digital format, available for download & stream by only the most discerning of listener."

https://flakebelly.bandcamp.com/
https://flakebelly.com/

(P) 2024 flakebelly - all rights reserved
(C) 2024 flakebelly - all rights reserved

Lazy Afternoon

The most radically altered song on the album. Fittingly in last place, it has it's own sound. The original song was guitar-based and had lyrics about stumbling around on Eglwysilan Common up in the valley above Treforest, chasing your mind's eye.

Crashing doom-laden piano chords, synth bass, end of the world trumpets, a guitar sound like Johnny Marr joined The Cure, a coda leaning into 90's rave. What's not to like?

Butterfly Brain

Built on 2 chords thrummed incessantly throughout 2003. I was famous for my two chords songs. And I really, really loved those particular 2 chords. Obsessed actually. I taught myself to strum swinging between that A minor and that Fmaj7. The little embellishments with the pinky finger. The me in the hand of 5. A simple 2 line refrain, what is now the chorus. Dusted of cobwebs and re-animated with my new-fangled music skills.
 
My songs aren't typically about any one thing, the best of them being created in a trance-like haze, where snippets of comprehension and inspiration are allowed to reveal themselves. Imagine a lyric that makes perfect sense, now scoop up a handful of those words and throw them back on the page, in random patterns. The original meaning is still there but obsured now. A picasso. Eyes on cheeks and mouths distorted. 

Suitably Waterline is a song of sleep and of dreams, the soul leaving the body as we slumber with a gently swaying, tidal feeling.

Waterline

The first year at the University of Glamorgan, probably late 2002. I only attended 3 lectures or so my entire career, preferring instead to plumb the depths of my soul and examine my mind from both micro and macro viewpoints, like a man standing between 2 parallel mirrors. After doing something that tends to keep you awake for too long, then doing it again, again, & then again. A marathon. 3 days later and still no sleep, a spider absailed down the curtains in my Halls cell-like box room. For some reason this produced an intense few hours of nightmarish arachnids lurking on ceiliings, chasing me down corridors, webs thick across the common room. God knows what I looked like, tearing wild-eyed past the silent doored & slumbering student rooms. Eventually managing to wake Matt, Apprentice Green's drummer, multi-instrumentalist & all round good egg. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the spider invasion had not occurred & I had not, in fact, been whisked off as the Devil's plaything to the caverns of Hell. Even the original rappelling spider was actually a bit of fluff suspended on a thread of curtain material. Ah well. Stay in school kids. 

The song was written a year or so later, morphing through a few forms. Special mention goes to Brummy's loping bassline & Matt's guitar overdubs. All recreated here. I have no idea how I wrote the piano riff. Probably just mashed the keys until it sounded good. Much like I do now.

Nightspiders

Apprentice Green founding member, name-giver & rhythm guitarist Alan, had these chords on guitar. Still awake early one morning in 2003 or 2004, after a night of mycelial fun, I read an article in the Guardian newspaper about a mountain climber & the rigors of climbing said mountains. Fingers so cold they can be peeled off. I wrote the lyrics, called it 'Thoughts Of All'. Next day I realised I'd misspelled ALL as AL, as in Alan & the lyrics fit his chords perfectly. Cosmic man.

I gave this version a deliberate Cure-like plod, sang the lyric as weird as possible and attempted the world's slowest guitar solo. The demo version from 2003 is still one of my favourite things I've ever recorded. Just for the ragged, joyous soul in it. The recording was, at the time, way above my skill level, another one-night magical act of improvised creation.

Caution

Written in a basic form in 2003 or 2004. The lead guitar line suggested the words. We were living in Treforest outside Pontypridd in Wales, in student squalor in a Victorian semi detached. There's a lot of weather in the valleys. The title was cribbed from a T.S. Eliot poem. I don't remember why I used it but it's the kind of thing I used to do way back when.

My favourite bassline I've managed yet. And a flavour of Syd Barrett in the lead guitar.

What The Thunder Said

TimeBomb was written and recorded in a dream-like 12 hours, overnight of October 27th 2022 in my old garden shed home studio, on Sanday Island in The Orkneys. It's a hypnotic, dreampop / shoegazing slice of aural synaesthesia, laid back and driving at the same time. The lyrics describe an ecstatic state, when the veil is torn asunder and we glimpse the numinous. A peek behind the wizard's curtain, when we peep a little over the How and into the Loop. 

The psychedelic sound and title gave me the idea to re-work my old demos from 2003, so it gets the best seat at the head of the table.

TimeBomb

Buy on Bandcamp

At The Prow Of The Lifeboat

A Spy In The Ointment

Rotten

Bottled Up

Newspaper Stairs

Leavedate

You Me Holiday

All About Her

Smile Report

Loophole

What In The World You Gonna Do Now?

Wind

Toothful

It's Your Birthday

Pulsatile Tinnitus

Water

I Hate You

A raw and unflinching meditation on isolation and reckoning, At The Prow Of The Lifeboat is the first glimpse into flakebelly’s forthcoming album, The Boy In The Diving Bell. Stripped-down yet searing, the track drifts between hushed, palm-muted acoustic guitar and an aching string quartet, all anchored by flakebelly’s intimate, unvarnished vocal delivery.

A reflection on a lifetime of social missteps and unseen struggles, At The Prow Of The Lifeboat channels the weight of unfinished business into something both deeply personal and quietly vengeful. It’s a reckoning, a release, and a question left hanging in the air - what happens when you come calling for the ghosts of your past?

The album as a whole grows from the alt-folk roots of At The Prow Of The Lifeboat to more experimental, psych-folk territories, blending raw acoustic textures with surreal, otherworldly soundscapes. With its lo-fi aesthetic, first-take performances, and the imperfections of an ancient analog Akai tape machine, The Boy In The Diving Bell embraces its rawness, mistakes left in, and a uniquely unpolished atmosphere. For those drawn to the stark honesty of Elliott Smith or the simmering intensity of early Nick Cave, At The Prow Of The Lifeboat offers a haunting introduction to the diverse and immersive sonic world of The Boy In The Diving Bell.


At The Prow of The Lifeboat

An alternative Christmas song for anyone who finds the season a little unbearable. A bad Santa, a wrecked family gathering, and a mess of guitars dragged through tape and valves.  Come with me, as we head home to ruin a family Christmas.

"christmas comes but once, so don't delay
pick up the bag with the tools and on your way
broken starlight frosts its shimmer down
footprints lend of themselves to the frozen ground
all year spent in hibernation been biding my time with delight
i am the ghost of circumstance
at the yuletide feast tonight

kismet calling up kitschness personified
a little red hat and a fistful of mince pie
nosing about in your tinseled little town
trying on your slippers and gown
I drink your whiskey, face-plant the turkey
thumb out your christmas pudding money
then I creep back up to the top of the chimney stack
a sack full of toys and away

merry christmas, dearest fuck you all
have a good one
merry christmas!

have a good look at the world and turn away
primates shitting out ink to mark a claim
you say it's part of the game 
but all i see is
rocket men at rocket play
have a little bit of the cold-hard truth
oh, i'm so glad I could bring the news
toys all wrapped in a burglar's sack
and i'm off on my merry way

merry christmas, dearest fuck you all
have a good one
merry christmas!
merry christmas, dearest fuck you all
have a good one
merry christmas!

merry christmas, dearest fuck you all
have a good one
merry christmas!"

Merry Christmas

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

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.

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

flakebelly

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