“I was really cut off from my surroundings as a kid, always in my own world, making things. I didn't really have a lot of friends. I enjoyed my own company. I was quite introverted,” says Gazelle Twin's Elizabeth Walling.

This may explain the air of projected inner worlds on The Entire City, the incredibly accomplished debut LP she released in July through independent label Anti-Ghost Moon Ray Records - it ripples with the kind of rich, escapist visions that introspective kids are so adept at creating, an opera of dark, eerie electronica inspired by choral music, sci-fi film scores and futuristic landscapes, euphoric and thrilling by turns.

The Brighton-based artist's live shows are major performances, replete with choreography, avant-garde costumes and mysterious masks, aligning her with fellow visual artist Karin Dreijer Andersson of The Knife and Fever Ray. Seeing the musical pioneer at a now-defunct Brighton festival a few years back proved catalytic for Gazelle Twin. Walling was on the same bill, performing with a small band; “I spent the whole day hating that performance. I hated what I was wearing, hated that I'd had to think about what I was wearing and how it related to the music. I'd been going through it the whole day and was thinking “how am I going to do this?” We saw Fever Ray perform that evening and the penny dropped. There was just this blob, this shadow on stage. I knew the album but I'd never seen the visual side of it.” The first Gazelle Twin costumes Walling put together were initially inspired by Surrealist painter Max Ernest's alter ego/familiar Loplop, an alien, quasi-avian creature that featured in his paintings, but she concedes that it was also “very easy” to see Andersson's influence at work in her creations.

Like Andersson, Walling's works offers the possibility of queer tropes. The Entire City is steeped in sci-fi aesthetic, a traditionally fertile space for deconstructing gender and exploring 'otherness'. “It fascinates me, certainly, and queerness is an interesting thing to have in pop. People like Bowie lived it, to some degree” she ponders. “I suppose what I set out to do - which is not always what you end up doing - was to bulk out my form, hide my face and remove my gender and personality from my performance, but I think the feminine is still very present in what I'm doing”.

The elegant soprano miasmas in The Entire City are certainly feminine sounding, but in stippling them with FX glitches, she subverts them, adding a hypnotic cyborg quality. “A lot of those vocal effects are actually influenced by artist like Prince” she reveals, whose track 'I Wonder U' she covered last year. “He skipped between feminine and masculine ranges in a really strange, fascinating way. It's the same reason I admire contemporary artists like Fever Ray and Planningtorock.”

Her fascination with underwater life and the paranormal is visible in the eerie, monochrome music videos she's created, interests nurtured since childhood. “I was lucky to grow up in a creative environment; both my parents are artists and my family are all creatively gifted, so I was always open to exploring the world in that context. I found sci-fi films very early on and was always fascinated with nature and the supernatural. They're things I connect with my first childhood home. We left when I was five, but I still remember every inch of it.” She recalls a “presence” that lived in her parents' room, and claims that the whole family are “sensitive” to the paranormal. This strand of the interest can take on an air of the mystical in her video for single 'Men Like Gods', which contains footage from an ancient Pagan festival in remote Sardinia. “I'm interested in the paranormal, but in a psychological sense rather than a religious one” she qualifies. “Gazelle Twin is about all the things from my childhood that I've never pulled away from.”

Walling was a tomboy teen. The typical pressures of adolescence left her excluded from the hormone-driven school set, uninterested in fitting in with the promiscuous girly scene. “I was horribly shy, incredibly thin; it was mostly physical stuff I suppose.” Its seems there's a clear link between this painfully reticent period of becoming and the transformative, shape shifting figure of the masked Gazelle Twin persona she inhabits as an adult. “Yes” she agrees. “I never thought about that initially though. I loved performing, but I didn't like the feeling of being looked at so much. I was bullied for a while. I had a very destructive best friend. My grammar school was very bullish, and I just didn't deal well with it all. I felt abnormal and pretty morose. I'm fine now, but those things linger. It's been a personal mission of mine to make sense of them now. “

Walling's art is cathartic, but she's driven by spontaneity as much as anything else. “I still create on a whim. And I never start out writing lyrics, I just sing sounds; in a way they're quite feral. No matter how vague the sounds may be, I can always return to them and carve words out of them later on.” She finds this primal-sounding process far more fulfilling then the brief vocal training she endured during her short time at Goldsmith's. “I wanted to study composition, but I'd applied as a singer so they wanted me to have opera lessons. I found myself being shouted at a lot by this Scottish dame, so I transferred to Sussex University and got into composition and electronics. I did some singing on the side - performances of my own pieces, as well as writing for small mainly contemporary classical ensembles. It was plinky plonk stuff, atonal, hard to listen to, angsty music. I loved learning how to write weird pieces like that.”

She cultivated an appreciation for the “double meanings” in the English ballads she studied, and found a muse in the 14th century composer Carlo Gesualdo. “He's one of my 'musicians of the past' obsessions. He murdered his wife and her lover and was consumed by absolute guilt for the rest of his life. He wrote really bizarre scores. He'd inject these totally alien notes into choral passages.”

Walling is a fan of the progressive, whether its visionary composers of yesteryear or future technologies. She created an interactive, web-based 3D counterpart for The Entire City, and is fascinated by video games. “I've not had much time to play recently, but in the past I loved role play games set in otherworldly places, and there are so many of those now.”

Her favourite is Half-Life 2, a dystopian affair full of mutated humans and defunct power stations, “not so far off some of the themes in my album!” she laughs. Is she keen on scoring a video game at some point? “I'd give anything to do that. I think some of my songs on The Entire City would suit sci-fi video games. There is this extraordinary misconception that video games are artless, but the graphics are so realistic nowadays, and the stories can be very intense. With the right music, they can be incredible.”

Gazelle Twin live dates:
1 September - Electrowerkz, London,
18 November - Green Door Store, Brighton