Chinese superstar Sa Dingding is equally adept at composing her music on a two-string horse-hair fiddle or a computer. She sings in Mandarin, Mongolian, Tibetan and Sanskrit and lists Jay-Z and the Chemical Brothers as major influences. Welcome to the modern world of Asian pop music.

Her debut album, Alive, released last week in North America on Wrasse Records, has sold millions of copies in Asia and won a BBC Radio 3 World Music Award for best album in the Asia-Pacific category. Recorded in Shanghai the CD moves back and forth between East and West combining electronica and pop with traditional Asian elements.

It's no accident that the 25-year-old Beijing resident seems most comfortable when she's on the move. "I was born to a Mongolian mother and a Han Chinese father," she says in broken English over the phone. "Until I was six I lived with my grandmother in the Mongolian grasslands." Talking with the assistance of translator Sonny Wu, Sa answers some questions in English but prefers to speak in Mandarin and by the end of the interview that's all she uses.

"It was very beautiful," she says. "Everyday I could play in the grasslands. I could hear the people sing a song with the horse-hair fiddles. Those days taught me that music is freedom."

At the age of six, Sa accompanied her parents as they moved around the southwestern Chinese provinces of Yunnan and Sichuan. When she was 17 they settled in Beijing and Sa enrolled in university to study music.

Perhaps more than anything the young musician is a student of culture. She picked up the different languages she speaks while travelling with her parents. "I have two interests," says Sa. "One is modern music and the other is Asian culture and language."

Two songs on Alive feature a made-up language that Sa created while recording in the studio. "One song, Oldster by Xilin River, I wrote to remember my Grandma. At first I wrote down some Mandarin lyrics but I found the love and emotion that I had for my Grandma missing so I changed it to express my feelings. I searched deep into my memories and the language my Grandma used to talk with me."

Sa improvised the language on the spot in the studio and then recorded it again using the same pronounciation (the "lyrics" of the made-up language are included phonetically in the CD booklet along with songs in other languages).

"Music has a (primal) function that can convey people's emotion without limiting it to language," says Sa. "We look back through the music itself and listen with an honest heart. We can feel the emotion from the music."

The vocal for Oldster by Xilin River is accompanied by an electronica soundscape as well as a horse-hair fiddle which was recorded separately in Beijing. Some of the tracks on the CD include instrumentation performed live in the Shanghai Broadcasting Building studios while others were realized using computer technology.

Sa may listen to the likes of Jay-Z and the Chemical Brothers but the western musician she most closely resembles is Peter Gabriel. The title track, Alive, employs bass and guitar in tandem with electronica percussion and a gu zheng (Asian zither) to create a sound that wouldn't sound out of place on one of Gabriel's albums. It's no accident that she performed at the WOMAD festival in the U.K. in July -- WOMAD is an organization that Gabriel helped set up to promote world music and Sa fits in perfectly with their mandate.

Accepting the WOMAD gig as part of a European tour meant that Sa wasn't available to perform at the Beijing Olympics. "Several months ago I got an invitation to perform at the opening ceremonies," says Sa. "But because I was busy preparing for my European tour I didn't have time for the Olympic show. I was also invited to perform right after the Olympics and that will be the first open show in the stadium."

-by John Goodman