Review: Sampha, Kelsey Lu and serpentwithfeet team for a night of new, noisy virtuosity

Three acts at the vanguard of black experimental music finally have shared a bill here in L.A.

Serpentwithfeet, Kelsey Lu and Sampha all sound very different, with their own inclinations toward harshness and beauty. But all make impressive use of the blurring lines between avant-garde noise, jazz and classical forms, as well as vocals that tie the music together with heart and heartbreak.

The show at the Palace in downtown on Tuesday (a kickoff event for Red Bull’s “30 Days in L.A.” series) was, despite its energy-drink provenances, a pretty remarkable showcase for a new crest of talent turning genres inside-out.

Serpentwithfeet’s Josiah Wise is a one-of-a-kind talent, with a voice dipped in gospel, musical theater, contemporary R&B and something else wholly his own. His music dices up Tchaikovsky horns and late-hours soul piano with modern beat-making and rapid-fire narratives from the edges of queer love and lust.

Wise cuts a striking figure onstage. It’s rare that a voice like his is paired with a prominent pentagram face tattoo and a wrist-sized septum piercing. But to the Palace crowd, his set was as intimate as a goodnight kiss. “Blisters,” his breakthrough EP, is a worthy document of a rising young artist, but it doesn’t do justice to what it was like to feel that much, and that hard, in an early opening set.

Frank Ocean comparisons are easy and too simple for what Wise is up to, but it’s a useful reference point for an artist who put queerness, blackness and the best kind of weirdness into such sharp relief onstage.

Wise hugged the night’s second act, Lu, as she walked onstage to take his place. It was a sweet, small gesture, but it cemented that there was an affection and respect here beyond just a well-curated mini-fest bill.

Lu came at her sound with opposite tools: a cello, a loop pedal and a more rigorous idea of form. But it hit a similar sweet spot, with the sense that something new was afoot. Lu is easy to root for. Her talent and training are immense, and acts from Blood Orange to Florence and the Machine have championed her beguiling, haunting sound. It’s informed by a Jehovah’s Witness upbringing, with a mix of love and loathing for sacred music and the demands it makes on a young mind.

But the highlight of her short set was a mind-bending cover of the Shirelles’ “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow” that completely flipped the ’60s girl-group formula into something that actually felt like longing — strange, implacable, and again, defiantly new.

Sampha, the frequent Drake collaborator, is not so new to the pop world. But he might soon have a bigger place in it. He sits comfortably in today’s crop of late-hours vocalists putting British electronic styles to pop-friendly ends. But his own set (with Lu on cello and electronic drums) finally captured the breadth of his skills — a fine keyboardist and pianist, a songwriter of poise and candor.

His upcoming debut, “Process,” will give him a seat at the same table that provided Solange a top-selling LP. He already has a hit bubbling with “Blood on Me,” but the night’s most revealing moment came during a simple, spare take on “No One Knows Me (Like the Piano),” an ode to his mother’s warmth and influence that felt radical and relatable all at once.

It’s weird to root this hard for a Red Bull-curated event. But whoever was responsible for putting this edition together deserves praise for highlighting the connections between these artists. It might be too soon to call this small wave of black noise and virtuosity a movement, but on Tuesday, it sure felt like something was stirring.

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