Franco-Mexican singer Andrea Balency compares her music to a kaleidoscope.

Part of the reason is she sees music visually. When she reveals the music she is currently working on is an attempt to illustrate videos of multiplying and dividing atoms I suggest she might be blessed with synaesthesia.

“My mum is a painter,” she explains, referring to the condition in which people see sounds in their mind as colours or shapes. “I guess I got it from her. I’m very visual.”

Her mother, Elena Gomez-Toussaint, is an abstract painter well-known on the Mexican underground scene. Whether she’d agree with Balency the synthesizers on the follow-up to July’s Walls EP – due later in the year before a full album - sound like moving cells is another matter.

“I’m using more electronic sounds to create thicker textures,” explains Balency, of her current mode. “The first CD [Walls] was softer. A bit more organic. The new one will be darker, more 3D, more complex. I’ve found different ways of expressing more intensity in the music.”

Balency is a darling of the underground and fast-becoming one to watch. Elle, Grazia and New York Times Style Magazine have all profiled her.

The Cure invited her to open a show to 50,000 fans in Mexico. London via Brighton duo Mount Kimbie are fans and friends pencilled in to contribute to her debut record.

And Gilles Peterson has given Balency the stamp of approval, too. He premiered the highlight from Walls, the electronic white girl R ‘n’ B of You’ve Never Been Alone, on his Radio 6 show.

The track is about a relationship broken by Balency’s itinerant lifestyle. A collection of remixes of the track was released last month.

“The superficial way of seeing it is as a way of saying goodbye but not in angry way or in sad way. It’s more affectionate, but at same time a friend of mine, the guy who did the video for it, saw it as a song about feminine power. That made sense to me.”

Balency is certainly independent. She was born in Paris, where she learnt classical piano, moved to Mexico with her mother before heading in search of adventure and inspiration in Argentina. “I went to Argentina after school. I wanted to discover a new place. I went on my own when I was 17. I was supposed to stay for three months. I ended up staying for two years.”

In Buenos Aires she met singer-songwriter Lisandro Aristimuño, who remains a best friend.

“I liked his honesty when writing music and singing and I wanted to do the same thing. That is when I started playing other kinds of music that weren’t classical. That is where it started.”

After a stint back in Mexico, where she was spotted by a French music executive, she flew to Paris to sign with Bataille, home of French star and current Vanessa Paradis squeeze, Benjamin Biolay.

Now she’s in London. “I was tired of Paris. It’s the most beautiful city but I wanted to go somewhere where music is more modern, somewhere which would push me to be more avant garde; somewhere more exciting music wise.”

All the moving about is another flash in the kaleidoscopic circle.

“You would think because I am moving all the time it would be chaotic, it would have so many different influences and different contexts, but there is a harmony between the songs. They work together. It all goes through me and there is an identity.”

The move to England has not only brought her to the attention of the British press, who’ve compared her to leading lights of the dubstep, electronica, R&B and pop scene, but also brought her into contact with the city’s cutting edge.

London duo We Are Shining asked Balency to add her voice to Breaks, their co-write with Mercury Music Prize-nominated dancer turned singer, FKA Twigs, which was released September 8.

Her high, sometimes child-like voice has been the subject of much discussion. But, as Balency says: “If people love it or hate it is a good thing. It means it has personality.”

Recent covers of Little Dragon’s Paris and Serge Gainsbourg’s Adieu Creature reveal her tastes. The latter seems perfect for a girl who always seems to be leaving.

“It’s a goodbye song but in a funny way there is humour. It could be about death but I think it’s about him having had a fling with a girl and saying ‘you’re pretty, goodbye’.”