November 2019. A disused art deco cinema in Hackney, east London, is bathed in a wash of red light. Crowds hush as the musician Kelsey Lu takes the stage for a performance she has called Grounded. Beneath her feet, a pile of dirt. She moves slowly around the microphone stand, her body contorting, her face concealed behind a veil of mesh. She holds out, refusing to sing, the audience suspended in anticipation, uncertain, enthralled. When she finally breaks her silence with the first plaintive note of her improvised opening track, it is nestled between the sounds coming from a suite of live percussionists. The audience is transfixed. They’re fans, of course: fans of a style critics have found difficult to describe, even as they heaped Lu’s debut album, viscerally titled Blood and released in April last year, with plaudits. Naturalistic yet experimental, surreal yet deeply, well, grounded, modern but couched in the bold, resonant sound of classical music by her expert cello playing (she learnt when she was nine) – such myriad descriptors lead NME to, prosaically, dub her music alt-classical. Others, perhaps more enamoured, continue a valiant tussle to better define its fusion of genres and intentions. It’s a sound that, according to The New York Times, her friends call “Lu-thereal”. Which is perhaps the neatest summary, since it is simultaneously utterly singular and entirely otherworldly. That was also the notion behind Grounded: to craft another world, through sound, visuals, costume and movement. This was her coming out. It was an opportunity, maybe her fans’ first, to not simply be an observer of Kelsey Lu, but to dive into her universe.