“Societies wouldn’t really work if people stayed where they were born,” insists Martin Green, a Cambridge-raised experimental musician and one-third of the folk trio Lau (named Best Group by the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards four times). His audio-visual performance Flit is a call to consider “what it must feel like to move”.

He and a team of musicians have linked up with BAFTA-award winning animating duo Whiterobot to produce an original album inspired by the stories of migrants, many from his own family. On a set designed as a cave, the atmospheric and ethereal album is performed live amid stop-motion animations, made entirely from brown packaging paper.

“Visually it’s the brownest show I’ve ever seen,” Green jokes. “I do think there’s something that pulls you in, because we’re in this cave and because of how the animation is played. I hope it’s an immersive, slightly dream-like experience.”

The project started over two years ago, and despite not being inspired by recent political events, the current context makes the show even more relevant. According to the UN, an estimated 11 million Syrians have fled their homes since 2011, while over one million have requested asylum to Europe, at a time when many see Brexit and other political shifts across the Northern Hemisphere as a retreat to more nativist attitudes.

Regardless of Green’s original apolitical intentions, he still has strong views on the matter. “I’ve now done quite a lot of interviews of this sort and I started off saying ‘yeah, it’s not supposed be opinionated, we’re just musing around the subject’, but actually, that’s bollocks, of course it is! Of course I have an opinion, of course I have feelings on the subject. It’s not a time to keep opinions to yourself.”

“Not all the stories in Flit are negative,” he makes clear. “I think because of various global situations at the moment, migration is viewed as a negative phenomenon. Part of the point of this is that we don’t really think that.”

“The way a lot of this discussion becomes so negative is that for a lot of the press, the starting point is that people should stay where they are born, as if that is somehow a more natural approach to existence.”

One of the stories which inspired him was that of his great-grandparents fleeing Austria in the 1930s. His great-grandfather fled to Shanghai and ended up in a Jewish ghetto: “Other places were closing their borders pretty rapidly – that’s why he went to Shanghai. You didn’t need border papers to get into China. Later on, my great-grandmother, with my grandmother, went to England. That’s how, from Austria, they ended up at opposite ends of the planet.” The story, which ended with a reunion in London seven years later, inspired the song ‘Roll Away’.

Other sources include the emigration of his wife’s family from Shetland and stories of individuals from East Germany and India. However, Green attempts to anonymise these figures in Flit. In an attempt to contemplate the phenomenon of migration as a whole, he and his team ensured that within the film and in the lyrics there are specific mentions of neither time nor geography.

Green himself has done his fair bit of moving, albeit within the UK. Born in Sheffield and raised in Cambridge, he now lives near Edinburgh. “Any species will always gravitate to where it can flourish, be it due to genuine danger, the attraction to another part of the world, because of someone you’ve met, or a career opportunity.”

With mixed-media and stunning visuals, can we expect a Beyoncé or Frank Ocean-style visual album? “We’re not quite sure. The film was made to map to a 3D stage, so it wouldn’t be quite representative to show it in a square box. But I do think it’s an interesting thing that as more and more people consume music, even just through YouTube, they want something to look at as they do it.”

Green sounds intrigued by the possibilities the trend could bring. “It’s probably going to result in some great film being made, and these things have their time, don’t they? There were amazing things made for MTV, when that first spawned.”

Green’s previous album, Crows’ Bones, meditated on death and ghosts. Now he’s exploring migration – concept albums seem to stimulate his experimental brain. “It’s a great antidote to writer’s block because you’ve got something to consider. Writing music about something abstract is harder than when you’ve got a theme. If you’re stuck, at least you can go and read and something will happen.”

What next? “I’m quite into the science of music. There are visually beautiful things to be found in making instruments that physically demonstrate wave forms and the physical shape of music itself is quite a beautiful thing to explore. There’s a lot of room to manoeuvre in the mad laboratory.”

Flit shows on 22nd October at the Cambridge Junction (www.junction.co.uk). Martin Green (Lau) appears with Dominic Aitchison (Mogwai), Adrian Utley (Portishead), Becky Unthank (The Unthanks) and Adam Holmes. Book ahead. The album Flit is now on Spotify.