Robert Fripp and Adrian Belew at the Portobello Hotel, London, in 1981. Fripp later fired Belew after 33 years via email. Credit:Getty Images "Every time you play the music for half an hour, it's different," he says. "There's hundreds of bits of music and hundreds of bits of songs and they interrupt each other and change and flow randomly. "It's because I believe that's the way our minds are taught, now, to operate. We get information in quick, short bursts, via the internet and TV commercials and whether we know it or not, our brains have been trained to want that. "We don't need songs to be four minutes long with three choruses the same any more. This is an alternative to all that." Sure enough, a standard half-hour session with Flux is an enormously satisfying experience. As the on-screen art work wriggles and morphs in a hundred ways, snatches of song, sound effects and symphony interweave with seamless grace in fragments of two to maybe 100 seconds.

Waves lap, voices giggle, marbles roll and coffee grinders rattle between Belew compositions of innumerable styles and shades, from the Beatlish harmonies of his Cincinnati high school band to Zappa-esque flourishes and lush orchestrations. Bizarrely, it works – possibly more effectively than any of the music-streaming systems we've accumulated over the past century. From gramophone to Spotify, maybe it's the sheer predictability of those systems that invites listeners to disengage. With Flux, there's no time to be bored. The same might be said of Belew's career, which began in earnest with an intense year as Zappa's "stunt guitarist" in 1977. Bowie poached him the following year to tour Heroes and record Lodger. His unique sonic range on the guitar – often more animal than wood and wire – quickly became its own calling card. "I get really inspired by sound itself," he says. "That's why I try to make the guitar do so many things because when I find a new sound it's like, 'OK, this is going to be the birth of a new song or a new piece of music'." Unlike the standard album-tour-downtime cycle, Flux is a constant creative outlet for Belew. He likes to rise early in his Nashville home and take in the surrounding forest to get his juices flowing. There's a certain chair he likes, perched between two differently tuned guitars, "and it seems like any time I sit down there something starts happening".

Also, "the entire lower floor of my house is a full-on recording studio with three drum kits, piano and tonnes of instruments, so there's always somewhere to go to be inspired". In this way, a new piece might be inserted into the Flux matrix at any time. The road still calls, of course. In January Belew played the Sydney Opera House with a massive entourage of Bowie alumni, paying tribute to their friend and inspiration. "I personally always thought there would be another Adrian and David period of music, where he would call me and say, 'Come on up to New York, let's get going, let's do something really different'," he says sadly. "So obviously when he died, that was the thing that hurt me most: the finality of it. Now I never will get to create something with him again. I loved being around him for so many reasons. He was such a smart guy and so curious about everything." The January tour put "an exclamation mark" to that chapter of his creative life. His liner notes to a forthcoming Zappa box set, recorded live in New York 40 years ago, serve a similar function, he says. With his exit from King Crimson, a film score for the Oscar-winning Pixar short Piper, and six years of Flux snowballing, he feels a new phase opening up.

"Flux really is everything, musically, that I can possibly do," he says. "It has every kind of thing in it. I mean, I've really stretched myself in so many ways and it's been very artistically freeing and inspiring. I'm 10 times more productive now than I've ever been." On stage with his Power Trio – bassist Julie Slick and drummer Tobias Ralph complete the threesome – the principles of Flux have also come to play an important role, Belew says, with pieces from Bowie, Zappa, Crimson and Taking Heads all likely to make fragmented appearances. "We might be going along quite wonderfully and then, all of a sudden, take a complete left turn. Something happens; some sound may be triggered from my computer with my foot, some random thing that happens for five seconds and then we're off into another song – maybe halfway through another song. "The joy of it is that it's so fast-paced and you get a lot of music in one night. I see the audiences go crazy because they don't know what to expect at all. The band is really on its toes – and these are incredible musicians. There's no two shows alike, that's for sure." The Adrian Belew Power Trio will play nightly at Bird's Basement on June 13-18. birdsbasement.com