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Call it what you will — baroque rock, intellectual indie, chicks in costumes with cellos playing weird stuff.

It all fits. And none of it matters. At least not to Melora Creager, the founder and brainchild behind Rasputina, one of the more eclectic and thought-provoking ensembles on the indie rock scene today.

On one hand, Rasputina can be classified as one of a handful of bands that could be considered neo-progressive rock. Joanna Newsom, Coheed and Cambria, The Decemberists — none of them sound the same, but the concept behind what they do is very similar: tackling typically non-rock subject matter, drawing inspiration from literature and other works of art and creating music with an unusual combination of instruments and arrangements.

Rasputina certainly fits those qualifications. But Creager isn’t interested in being classified. If anything, she sees her band as an intellectual pursuit, an outlet for her interests and passions, and a way to share her observations and knowledge with those who have fallen in love with her music over the years.

“I just like to dissect things, like heavy rock — what makes something heavy, and why people like that stuff,” Creager told The Daily Times during a recent interview. “I want to know how it’s built and put together, and I want to try and do that, too. I don’t really pay attention to or focus on music to get excited about what I do.

“I look to the natural world and to books for inspiration. Lately, I’ve been studying and taking courses in a form of music therapy that involves playing music for the sick and the dying. I’ve had to read a lot for that, and I just read a book about common phenomena for people who are actively dying.”

“I think a book like that, the whole subject in fact, is new to me and separate from my songwriting,” she added. “It’s more like developing my life and my inner person in a good way, and it may come out later in my music, but I don’t know how.”

To date, much of what flows through Creager’s brain comes out later in her art. Take, for example, her classical music training. Born and raised in Kansas, she studied classical music as a child, moving to New York when she was 18 to attend design school. Although majoring in photography, she began playing her cello in rock bands and in NYC’s drag scene. An early project was The Fingerlakes Trio, a group that performed classical covers of disco hits. She later joined the band Ultra Vivid Scene, recording three albums with the group for British label 4AD and garnering opening slots for such bands as The Pixies, Belly and Throwing Muses.

After returning from a tour as the cellist for Nirvana on the latter’s “In Utero” tour, she started thinking about putting together a project of her own; hence, Rasputina was born.

“When it started, I was just out of art school and used to working by conceptual assignments, and that’s what the band was at the start,” she said. “The concept, the idea that I wanted to present, was like a performance art idea. We started with seven cellists who had no experience, and we didn’t sound very good. It took a lot of years to get the sound as good as the idea was, but steadily, after all these years, we’ve gotten better and better.”

At first, Rasputina began as an all-girl project. Slowly, it became a gender-neutral project in which the members adopt a gamut of costumes — Victorian in the beginning, evolving into an “amalgam of historical feminine icons — Indian princesses, Hawaiian handmaidens and fallen medieval queens.”

The band recorded two albums on Columbia Records, “Thanks for the Ether” and “How We Quit the Forest.” After a short break during which Creager gave birth to a daughter, the band returned with two additional albums on Instinct Records, “Cabin Fever” and “Frustration Plantation,” as well as the live record “A Radical Recital.” In their early years, the band hitched up its wagon to the industrial metal scene, touring first with Marilyn Manson and then working with new drummer, producer and former Nine Inch Nails member Chris Vrenna.

Although some fans were dismayed at Creager’s decision to involve Rasputina with the shock-rocker, she sees it as another step on her long journey toward musical enlightenment.

“The music has always had great integrity, and as we’ve learned more about it, we’ve grown,” she said. “That decision might have turned off some people, but at that time, I got very interested in rock music and how it worked. We didn’t have that many fans at the time, so by touring with Marilyn Manson, we gained more fans from the exposure than we lost.

“To me, rock was an intellectual pursuit. I felt OK about it, and I didn’t think it was a sell-out thing at all.”

With “Oh Perilous World!”, the band’s most recent album, Creager said she felt ready to take explore other paths — specifically, unshackling her mind from the preconceived notions of how the band’s music should sound.

“I think I’ve mastered the rock and gotten it out of my system,” she said. “In writing this new record, I realized from all my years in the music business that I was trying to write hooks and get played on the radio. That had become second nature in the back of my head — to try and write a hit, and that’s ridiculous for what I do.

“When I realized I thought that way, I stopped it, and I realized what the songs were really about without those thoughts. And I think it makes a better song.”

For lyrical subject matter, she turned to the news, reading daily headlines and stories online and copying words and phrases that intrigued her. The song “Champion” is a rough translation of an Osama bin-Laden speech; “Child Soldier” references the child armies of Africa; “Old Yellowcake” uses imagery of the destruction of Fallujah in Iraq.

Given the overall historical fairy-tale nature of the narrative (something about Mary Todd Lincoln as the queen of Florida attacking Pitcairn Island), it’s pretty much a given that you’d be hard-pressed to hear Rasputina on the radio. Not that it matters to Creager. Even without her cult-like status among devoted fans, she’s still steering her ship in one direction — onward and upward, in pursuit of new knowledge and experience.

“I think radio is definitely obsolete and not realistic for us anyway,” she said. “I’ve always thought, on so many levels, that if we stay true to ourselves and our vision, everything will work out.”