In the last of our Womad series, Scott Kara talks to Chinese singer Sa Dingding about combining her nomadic musical roots with modern-day electronica
Growing up on the grasslands of Inner Mongolia, music and singing was part of everyday life for a little girl called Sa Dingding.
In fact, she has fond memories of how her nomadic life with her grandmother was like one "big music festival".
"It was a half nomadic life because in springtime we moved to grasslands and during winter we moved back to a little town near the grasslands," she says through a translator on the phone from Shanghai.
"During that time I would just play on the grasslands with the horses and other animals.
"So today when I think back I think the nomadic life is more or less like a big music festival that you go to every day, only there are no artists performing on stage because everyone on the grasslands is an artist because everyone can sing songs. It is like living in a big music festival."
However, music was more than just about entertainment and wiling away time - for nomadic people music is both a spiritual outlet as well as an indicator of status.
"Although the nomadic life is relaxing, people don't live a very rich life; they pay more attention to the spirit world and through music they speak out their emotions.
"Also, music is a very important standard to judge a person by in the grasslands because in city life we have different standards, like whether a person is wealthy, or has a successful career, but in the grasslands the judgment standard is if the person is able to sing a good song or play an instrument - these are the judgment standards for grassland people."
With Sa Dingding's type of purity of voice, then, she would rate pretty highly, and these days she makes a living out of music, having released two albums, the latest of which is Alive, and touring the world. The 25-year-old vocalist and multi-instrumentalist - who is quick to point out she's only really good at the Guzheng (a type of zither) and the horse-head fiddle - is on her way to New Zealand for WOMAD next weekend at New Plymouth's Bowl of Brooklands.
She decided to focus on music in her teens when she started to understand "the meaning of life".
And while the music she creates now has its roots in the songs she used to sing as a girl, it also brings together modern electronica, traditional Chinese instruments and vocals sung in a number of languages including Mandarin, Sanskrit, Tibetan and a "dreamed-up" dialect of her own creation.
While the title track and other songs like the delicate fragility of Holy Incense (the Chinese version) have an overwhelming Chinese sensibility, she says she only uses two traditional Chinese instruments on the album, with the rest made up of "Western" electronic instruments.
"I think it is interesting that people in the world say it has a very strong feeling of Chinese emotion. But what I want to tell people is that a certain type of emotion is not created by certain instruments from a culture. The thing that represents a culture is not an instrument or a sound, it is a human being and a human emotion, so the most important thing in music should be emotion."
LOWDOWN
Who: Sa Dingding
What: Modern electronica meets traditional Chinese folk music
Latest album: Alive, out now
Where & when: WOMAD, Bowl Of Brooklands, New Plymouth, March 13-15
