WogBelly is the musical alias of Jamil Zacharia, a Naarm/Melbourne-based producer, guitarist, and creative facilitator known for a seamless fusion of world, folk, and diasporic electronic music. Marked by warm, organic tones, their sound is inviting and adventurous, exploring themes of resistance, hope, cultural connection, and groovy softness. Their practice moves fluidly between production, live performance, collaboration, and community-led creative projects.

A significant part of WogBelly’s recent practice has developed through an extended period in Kenya, where Jamil spent two months immersed in the local music and creative communities. While based in Kenya, they established Black Mondays, a recurring creative meetup held across the road from the White House in Diani Beach, bringing together local artists, musicians, DJs, and creatives to connect, collaborate, and share ideas. The project reflects WogBelly’s broader interest in creating spaces where emerging artists can meet outside of traditional industry structures and develop their work collectively.

Jamil has also been involved in local creative projects in Diani Beach, building relationships with Kenyan musicians and creatives and exploring the connections between East African musical traditions, contemporary Afrobeats, electronic production, and diasporic musical culture. During this period, they also performed as a guitarist alongside Afrobeats DJs, bringing live guitar into DJ-led sets and exploring the possibilities of improvisation and live instrumentation within contemporary African dance music.

Following this experience, WogBelly is developing plans to establish a music studio in Kenya dedicated to supporting unsigned and emerging artists. The studio will provide a space for recording, production, collaboration, and artist development, with the aim of helping independent musicians develop their sound and connect with broader creative networks between Kenya, Australia, and the wider diaspora.

A mainstay of the Naarm scene, WogBelly first gained recognition with Demian, an instrumental post-jazz band blending improvisation, post-rock, complex rhythms, and ambient textures, featuring SILENTJAY (Alejandro Abapo) on saxophone. In 2013, they released Demian’s self-titled EP, which they wrote and produced alongside SILENTJAY. They went on to collaborate on various projects, including producing and recording drums for 3070’s ELEVATE EP, playing guitar with Clever Austin (the solo project of Hiatus Kaiyote’s Perrin Moss), and contributing guitar to Blue by Willow Beats (RIP).

They have also collaborated with Indian sitarist and folk singer Sarita McHarg, produced and recorded folk artist Imogen Pemberton’s EP Spine, and scored an episode of Ocean Talk, a surf film featuring Winston McCall of Parkway Drive. More recently, they have produced and performed with folktronic outfit Sunseeds, who blend South American folk with psychedelic and electronic influences, as well as Chilean folk singer Vanessa Estrada, contributing production and guitar to her original works including Agua Libre and En El Río.

WogBelly released an 8-minute musical reimagining of Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke, weaving together lush instrumentation with evocative samples from the film to create a vivid sonic homage to its epic storytelling. Under their own name, Jamil Zacharia, they released the introspective and emotionally rich EP The Soft Tread That Inspires, further showcasing their versatility and depth as a composer and producer.

Their mastering work includes Constantine Stefanou’s EP E L E M E N T A L, as well as two beat compilations by Australian/Japanese beatmaker Domsta 白昼夢: Dreamscape Vol. 1: Reverie and Dreamscape Vol. 2: Rapture. WogBelly also contributed original trap-inspired beats to both compilations, bridging their diverse influences with experimental edge and technical precision.

WogBelly’s artistic perspective is deeply informed by their Cypriot heritage—an island shaped by an ancient and ongoing history of imperialism, migration, and displacement. Their grandparents worked for over a decade in Wales, UK, labouring to build a future for their family, before losing everything and becoming refugees following the 1974 Turkish invasion. Cyprus’s history of colonialism, division, and displacement has shaped Jamil’s understanding of cultural identity, diaspora, resilience, and the ways communities preserve and reinvent culture across borders. These themes continue to inform WogBelly’s musical practice and growing interest in building connections between different diasporic and local creative communities.

Bringing together this broad experience across production, guitar performance, electronic music, live improvisation, artist collaboration, and community-building, WogBelly’s music is a uniquely personal expression—culturally rooted while constantly evolving through new encounters and environments.

In addition to releasing their own music, WogBelly is available for production work, guitar accompaniment, live performance with DJs and artists, and co-production, as well as creative collaboration and artist development.