Pianist Misaki Umei made her Fuji Rock debut on the Rookie a Go-Go stage a few years back. Humble beginnings for one of Rolling Stone Japan’s Future of Music artists. But who could have predicted what she would become, and who can predict where she is going from here.

Her classically trained technical skill on the piano is readily apparent, she is an obvious virtuoso. But what sets her apart is what she does with those skills. It is somewhere between club, classical, jazz and pure experimentation. It is evidence that sometimes a genius can get away with doing the things they want they way they want to if it is imbued with that genius.

She started her set with some deep trap-y beats, heavily auto tuned vocals, accompanying a backing track of her piano and beats with some of the wildest synthesizer madness you could hope to hear. It was an assault on the senses, something so foreign but so obviously brilliant.

There were also periods of pure DJing which truly felt like a mad scientist working in their lab. Perhaps not the easiest thing to dance to, but somehow all the more compelling for it.

Like a collision between a classical piano and a jazz synthesizer from Mars taking place in a drum machine factory, the first half of her set was some of the biggest sound to ever come out of a solo performer.

Then about halfway through the set a drummer joined the stage to improvise together with her. It even took a veteran player like Ebihara Hayate a moment to pick up the beat, but once he did it was like magic. His juiced up jazz drumming with Umei-san’s bonkers jazz symphonies was a thing to hear.

Sometimes the most genius things are the hardest things to explain, or indeed to even understand. But frequently we don’t need to understand or explain genius to appreciate and be moved by it. That is the impression Misaki Umei’s Saturday afternoon Gypsy Avalon set left lingering behind in the Naeba air.