Sa Dingding

“I always thought I had more things to say, more things I wanted to express.”
Nobody, it is safe to say, expresses things quite like Sa Dingding, the 26-year-old star of Chinese electronica, who became one of the East’s most in-demand singers after the release of her debut album at the start of 2008. With her second album, Harmony, she delves deeper into the folk and traditional music of southwestern China in search of universal emotions and ways of expression.
She says things differently because she experiences things from an entirely different perspective. Born in the Chinese region of Inner Mongolia in 1983, Dingding grew up a nomad, travelling around eastern China with her family until they arrived in Beijing in 2000. Signed to Universal just as the world focused its attention on Beijing in 2008, she was seen as a voice from the heart of contemporary China, representative of both China’s 21st-century future and its rural past.
Her first European show was in front of a large, expectant crowd at the WOMAD festival; her second British date was a BBC Prom in the Royal Albert Hall, where she celebrated winning a coveted Radio 3 Award for World Music. It was while on tour in Europe that she sat down for a meal with the producer Marius De Vries (U2, Bjork, Rufus Wainwright) and found a kindred spirit. She passed him seven demos and rough arrangements she had been working on since the release of Alive.
“I had a lot of new ideas and I definitely didn’t want to make Alive Part II. I wanted to go further back and look at the relationship between humans and nature. There is an old Chinese proverb: ‘First there is harmony between people and nature, and then everything can come alive.’ This album goes back to that original thing we have with the earth, but musically it is more distinctively about the balance between East and West, between traditional and modern. I wanted to start from the roots of Chinese ethnic music and develop them for the modern electronic world.”
Together, Dingding and De Vries developed a further three songs - Ha Ha Lili, Lucky Day and the mantra Xi Carnival – that emerged from the discussions they had about a music. Lucky Day sees the singer recording in English for the first time, with lyrics De Vries wrote about his experiences in China and set to beats that Dingding had decided should be a tribute to Michael Jackson (this was four months before his death).
Working on her own songs with a name producer was a new experience for her: Alive was self-produced and recorded before she had signed to a record label. This time there was pressure on her to live up to the potential of that debut. While she was aware she had to get everything right, to find different sounds, develop her understanding of harmony and ensure the backing vocals were exactly right, she knew she had a friend in the studio.
“Marius is would just tell me to go into the studio and sing whatever I want. The main thing I learnt from him, however, and which I will definitely acknowledge in the future, is that you have to be serious and respectful towards your music.” Despite the language difficulties, the seven demos and three news songs were turned into the completed album in just three weeks.
“Harmony is an expression of my thoughts and my life from spring 2009. When I was recording my first album I realised there are too many things that bother people and I wanted them to find calm from my music. Now I realise actually only by finding a balance between humanity and nature can people get this calm. If people found calm from Alive, I hope they find joy and happiness from Harmony.”