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Ami dang would prefer if you didn't refer to her music as "fusion." The style she's arrived at over her years studying music at Oberlin College and within Baltimore's avant-garde community is certainly distinctive, being a synthesis of classically trained, traditional Indian vocals and nimble, adroit sitar playing with minimalist electronic drones. Contemporary Western drone music, though, is very often cool, industrial, and ominous. Classical Indian music, on the other hand, is acoustic, melodic, and follows strict rules. In America, though, it might bring to mind sounds of Bollywood, '70s psych rock, and terrifically cheesy Indian pop music.

So, it's abrupt when you hear Indian classical music as meditative and spiritual--that is, as it is intended to be. And it's even more abrupt when it's heard woven into Western avant-garde music, each element working to develop/unshroud the other. This act is a large part of the sublime art of Ami Dang. No, it's not fusion--that word implies something unnatural.

Not that sitar is something anyone would consider natural: its über-twang alone sounds to belong on another planet to an American. In the hell of torturous instruments, the 20-plus stringed, mutant guitar-looking thing has a special place. "It's painful, hard," Dang says by cell phone while driving to North Carolina a few days before Christmas. Her mom, the reason she began learning the sitar in the first place, laughs in the passenger seat.

Unlike a guitar, or really most stringed instruments, a sitar player's fingers don't contact the fret board, only the strings, which is part of what lends the instrument its peculiar and entrancing sound. "[Your] fingers are pressed against nothing," she says. "Calluses [develop], really extreme grooves in your fingers. It completely kills all of the nerves in your first two fingers."

After learning the instrument through private lessons as a child, Dang gave it up in the early part of high school for the usual reasons: not wanting to practice, learning a difficult instrument. Toward the end of high school, however, she returned to it on her own. "When I picked it up again, I realized how different it was, how interesting," she says. "There was some motivation there that this is just really cool. I realized I was kind of good. My teacher in India was really encouraging. It's [also] a beautiful instrument. It's a way for me to appreciate my [Sikh] ethnicity."

At Oberlin, Dang began introducing sitar and classical vocals into the more Western, experimental music--tape music, sound collage, electronics--she was composing for classes and otherwise as a music major. That idea has grown and morphed into something more live, organic, and focused since, with the sitar and her voice front and center and drones forming a viscous foundation for the compositions. The combination's possibilities are powerful. "I guess I've constructed some weird relationship between everything," she says. She then pauses for a moment and adds uncertainly, "It's easier to experiment with instruments that people already don't understand that well," an observation that gets to the heart of why what she is doing is important.

There's a symbiosis between avant-garde drone music and traditional Indian music that illuminates the latter in an especially intoxicating way. Sitar, as is often translated for the West, rarely gets the chance to be heard on its own, relegated to bombastic band and pop arrangements that either obscure or parody the instrument. Dang's compositions compliment it instead. (Philip Glass and Ravi Shankar's 1990 Passages, a well-received marriage of modern classical composition and Shankar's atmospheric playing, is a touchstone for the relationship.)

"There are sympathetic strings under a sitar that resonate a certain way when you play certain notes," Dang says. "Delay brings that out."

In addition to expanding on the possibilities of the sitar, Dang is also substituting for the broader elements of a classical Indian ensemble. "Some of the electronics I use are used to sort of mimic the sound of a tanpura," she says, referring to a traditional stringed drone instrument. "It's interesting that with electronics--sampling, pedals--you can really do whatever you want. If I think about Indian rhythm patterns, it's nice that I can do something with electronics that can kind of mimic that."

Frankly, it is worth hearing Dang--mainly live, as she only has a smattering of circulating mp3 files--for her technical acumen with sitar and voice alone. But, it's the slow moving, pulsing drones--which are nothing but reverent, traditionalists might be surprised to hear--in tandem with sounds so alive, spiritual, and resonating they feel an instant part of you. It's a sort of vibrational captivity that touches on the religious.

E-mail Michael Byrne