BIO
Felix Machtelinckx is a singer, composer, producer and lyricist from Belgium. Featuring an array of film scores, dance soundtracks, pop, folk and electronic music, Felix's music resonates with a familiar,
almost nostalgic patina, applied with a distinctly crooked touch.
Through artistic collaboration, coaching and production, Felix has cut a dash in the pop and indie cult scenes of Belgium, especially with his band Tin Fingers, who are feted as one of the most promising indie acts of the moment.
PROJECTS
Productions:
Tin Fingers - Rock Bottom Ballads (album) - Written & produced
Tin Fingers - Groovebox Memories (album) - Written, produced & mixed
Tin Fingers - No Hero EP - Written & co-produced
Arsenal - The Rhythm of the Band (album) - Written & produced
Arsenal - Heavy Heart (single) - Written & produced
Arsenal - Okan Okunkun (album) - vocals, lyrics, co-writing
Saving Nico - Out of Sight (EP) - Produced
Saving Nico - Flood (album) - Produced, Mixed
Lisette - More Than Enough & Lucy (singles) - Produced, mixed
Halehan - The Child’s Compass (album) - Produced, mixed
Valerie and The Rain - Your Name (album) produced, mixed
The Payola Kid - Print by Print (EP) - produced, mixed
Soundtracks:
Kaiho - Welcome To My Funeral (dance)
Tuur Oosterlinck - Muttn (film)
Kaiho - Doggy Rugburn (dance)
Moonstein - My dear, my dearest dust (dance)
ALBUMS
Night Scenes - 2024 Subexotic
Night Scenes, Felix’s solo debut is, in contrast to his other work, more humble and less traditional, roughly hewn from a series of ambient soundscapes, earthy textures and playful structures. Felix’s voice, normally the flagship of his music, becomes more of a distant memory, an indistinct emotion feathered throughout the music. Many lyrics are improvised, sometimes unintelligible, conjuring haunted, uncertain undertones.
Similarly, the album is innately peripatetic to the core, being created, written and recorded in Lithuania, Belgium, France, mastered in the US, and finally released in the UK. In the first instance, some of the tracks were created for the contemporary dance piece Doggy Rugburn by Brandon Lagaert of Kaiho and Peeping Tom; others were created enigmatically for a film that never surfaced; while the remainder are the product of more personal work and research.
As Felix began to collect and review these disparate parts, the concept of a unified album began to evolve. With 'night' featuring as a suitably dark leitmotif, or backdrop to a series of emotionally fraught 'scenes', each track depicts a form of trauma, locked within the confines of the mind. Felix observes:
"Imagine yourself in a dusty old room unable to sleep. Emotions, fears and other demons haunt your mind. This in-between state makes your mind reach for other worlds. This is Night Scenes."
For the most part, Night Scenes was created using a variety of old, and rare, analogue equipment. With almost no digital editing, the record was primarily mixed through a vintage cassette desk, giving it a nostalgic character with a noisy undertone. Felix fully embraced the synergy of his emotional themes and retrograde gear, enthusing:
"A lot of textures were created on an old Soviet synthesizer that causes a blackout when you hit the lowest note on the keyboard. The dysfunctionality of the synths was often used to create rhythm and texture."
This unnerving ability Night Scenes has to comfort and confound the listener is summed up by Jordan Hudson, House Of Media producer, and music podcaster, when he concludes:
"Some songs on the album have this sort of fleeting comfort and tonality, which dissolves into a subtle rhythmic/structural or modulated disarray the moment I settle into them - this really fits with my experience of the night .. This record is a winner, and will be something I'll listen to a lot from here on."
All music written and produced by Felix Machtelinckx.
Songs ‘Make Me Sad’, ‘Love Made Me B*tter’, ‘Fireon’ and ‘Hypnose’ were originally written for the dance piece ‘Doggy Rugburn’ by Brandon Lagaert.
Mixed by Felix Machtelinckx
Mastered by D. James Goodwin, at The Isokon.
Artwork "I Am Forgettable" by Michel Vaerewijck
In-camera positive silver-cellulose on metal - 23x19 cm
Model on picture is Doriane Dubost Dessertine
michelvaerewijck.com
Artwork design by Benoit Vangeel
Deep south (2025) - Subexotic
Deep South is an array of experimental improvised songs, manifesting drought and nature’s organic textures, with vocals moving from bitter-sweet to harrowing, accompanied by alternate ear jazz drums. This provides an ambient landscape amidst fragments of songs, lullabies and poems in an unknown language.
“I started the research for the album with one central theme: drought. The dry ground beneath my feet felt like a good place to start. I went out in nature with an old cassette field recorder in the South of France, in search of textures that moved me. Soon I started to improvise little songs, lullabies and poems in unknown languages accompanied by nature and its rich palette of sounds. Creating rhythms by hitting tree barks, scratching rocks and walking among the thyme and rosemary in the rocky mountains, coexisting with a threatening hot summer wind. These improvisations became the base of the tracks on Deep South. All of the roots of the songs were created from an improvised session in nature. From a to z. I never chopped or messed with the base tracks.
Then the second part of the creative process started. I was invited by Kaiho Company to make a soundtrack for their next dance piece hosted by Fabbrica Europa and Aterballetto in Italy. So my quest for textures and feelings of the drought continued. Here, I used some of the improvisations to create the soundtrack. Tracks like The Riser, Giant Sleeps and Ossa had found their final shape in the dance studio's Twin Peaks-like Italian hotels and long train rides.
Other tracks were shaped to accompany the short movie ‘Muttn’ by Tuur Oosterlinck and became the harrowing undertone of the film. With all this input and direction I decided to let the tracks rest and fermentate. Though, I knew I wanted to shape them into an album later on.
After a long wintersleep, I felt I missed some rhythm and different kinds of textures. I wanted some real studio sounding drums to contrast the lo-fi and organic sound of the current tracks. So, I called my two favorite jazz drummers and booked a studio. It was challenging and very interesting to add drums at the end of the process. Not even one, but two drums! There was no fixed rhythm as the tracks are very floaty and organic. I wanted them to be like nature, without a computerized pulse or timecode. Van Soom and Caramin did their magic and so Deep South became reality.”