Recorded Live.. Hence the length.

Credit to the ghost of Colin for the image.

Docking Shot

Elliott Smith - Confusion

Troublesome Lie



Inspired by the poem by W. B. Yeats "The Second Coming"

Previously untitled.

The Ceremony of Innocence is Drowned.

Tie on with your clove hitch, equalise, double back, double check 
Rabbit round the tree to make your Figure 8 
Now you're tied to me, don't worry 
I might not seem like much but I can take your weight 
I might look a mess, I might be badly dressed
But you know that I ain't giving way 
So if you're losing your grip, don't panic
You can count on me, I'm your BHK

I'm your BHK

Tie on with your bowline, alpine butterfly
Back it with a prusik and we're good to go
Climb when ready, I'll be steady
If you're safe or not just need to let me know
Strength and honour, make it bomber
Camming with a friend stuck in an off-width crack
I'll be your rock on wire, you take a whipper
I'm your BHK and I have got your back

I'm your BHK

I will always be attentive, now I've got you at the end of my rope
Any time you feel you're pumping out, know that I'll be here to help you cope 
We can't always tell when our friends are just about to fall
But I've got you, I won't drop you
All you have to do is call 

I'm your BHK

Tie on with your clove hitch, equalise, double back, double check
Back it with a prusik and we're good to go
Climb when ready, I'll be steady
If you're safe or not just need to let me know
I might look a mess, I might be badly dressed
But I'll hold you up with all I've got 
So if you're losing your grip don't worry
You can count on me
Your Big Honking Knot

Elliott Smit- "Between the Bars" cover version

between the bars

Lines of Flight returns after two years with Celilo Falls // Crush, their first Double A-side and the first release since expanding to a five-piece. While maintaining their electro roots and reflective, human lyrics, the three new members inject a raw new wave energy into the sound adding post-punk basslines and pulsing rhythms adding fresh urgency and depth to the band's sonic identity.
This evolution is distilled in lead track Celilo Falls, which opens with a multi-voice plea, "I never wanted it to come to this," before launching into a driving bass and drum riff. The song’s sonic DNA echoes Killing Joke, Breeders, and Beastie Boys, balancing urgency with introspection. Celilo Falls reflects on the destruction of the past in pursuit of the new without questioning what has been taken before truly understanding its worth.

Celilo Falls

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

What In The World You Gonna Do Now?

Buy on Bandcamp

I wrote the first version of this poem in 2016, when it was published by The New European. Now set to The Big Grey Man’s music, it’s my offering for Christmas 2025, to stand opposite the saccharine and politically naïve Christmas songs that prevail at this time of year. As successive governments pursue inhumane and inhuman immigration, welfare and anti-peace policies, it’s a message of hope and determination. I reject hate. I reject evil. That’s the real message, not just at Christmas, but all year round.

Spoken
I reject that autumn starts on the first of September.
I reject that organised religion is faith.
I reject that faith engenders violence.
I reject that one faith is greater than another.
I reject that faith and science are mutually exclusive.
I reject that one country is greater than another.
I reject that humans are basically bad.
I reject that war is inevitable.
I reject that peace is impossible.
I reject that those who seek peace are appeasers.
I reject that those who oppose war are cowards.
I reject that austerity is a sound economic principle.
I reject that the poor should pay for the crimes of the rich.
I reject that immigration should be limited.
I reject that there’s a difference between races.
I reject that there’s any difference between individuals.
I reject that Brexit is permanent.
I reject that the sword is mightier than the pen.
I reject that love is nothing more than chemistry.
I reject hate.
I reject evil.

Sung
No lo creo.
Ten valor.
No pasarán.
Ven conmigo.
Estamos unidos.
No nos silenciarán.

I don't think so.
Have courage.
They shall not pass.
Come with me.
We are united.
They will not silence us.

Spoken
I reject evil.
I reject hate.

I believe that it’s not too late.

I reject evil.
I reject hate.

And I declare that it’s not too late.

Lyrics: Richard Pierce
Additional Lyrics: The Big Grey Man
Spoken Word: Richard Pierce
Music: The Big Grey Man
All instruments: The Big Grey Man
Sung vocals: The Big Grey Man
Engineering & production: The Big Grey Man
ISRC: QT6EU2590926

I Reject

For Your Eyes Only

Geoff Barrow and Adrian Utley of Portishead sit down for an exclusive interview over Skype with KEXP DJ Morgan Chosnyk. This is the cleaned up, yet unscripted full interview, warts and fun and all in which they tell the story of their beginnings and the making of this iconic, game-changing document.

Portishead Interview on 25th Anniversary of Dummy

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.

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

What In The World You Gonna Do Now?

flakebelly

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