In 2007, singer-songwriter Ember Swift took a trip to China, and there she found something they don't usually sell to tourists.

Herself.

What began as a holiday from constant touring and playing quickly turned into a year-long immersion in Chinese music and culture that prompted Swift to reinvent herself as a person, and an artist.

She took Mandarin lessons and found a place to live. Then she hooked up with Chinese and ex-pat musicians, gave up her life in Canada and learned what it feels like to begin all over again.

"I felt instantly at home there," Swift recalls of Beijing. "I found a sense of peace and inspiration. After 5,000 years of human civilization, the country has a different energy."

Whle in Beijing, Swift set about writing songs about her Asian transformation. In an outburst of creative energy, she and producer Tim Rideout recorded a new disc called Lentic. On it, she fuses her two cultures with folk, world, electronic and traditional Chinese music into a revelation she calls "Folktronica."

"This is a new beginning," says Swift, who at 34, has nine records to her credit.

Lentic is a scientific term that means "living in still waters", a reference to her state of mind in China.

"It's changed the way I write music. It's very visual and transportive, and takes the listener into new ways of thinking and new ways of being. Mandarin is a musical language that's pleasing to the ear."

In fact, she says Chinese now feels more like her native language than English, although she isn't fluent yet.

Swift isn't the first to take western popular music to the Chinese. The British band Japan pioneered that in the mid-1980s with their communist Chinese epic The Tin Drum. Swift, however, has loftier ambitions about her project. And she isn't afraid to share it.

"I am the only western musician I know who is recording music in ... English and Mandarin."

But as different as Lentic is from anything she previously recorded, the most radical change is in Swift herself, who has given up playing 200 concerts a year, and her social and political activism.

"China is so vast, it's overwhelming. I found the experience humbling. I realize now that the western culture I grew up with doesn't have all the answers."

Swift plays a few select Canadian gigs, including one at the Black Sheep Inn, before returning to China, where she's producing a new Chinese band.