The music of Ami Dang feels as though it’s in a place of near constant flux. That’s not to imply that it’s without a center, for her transporting vocal and sitar work definitely exudes a captivating soul. That’s also not to imply that she’s still finding her way, for her music bears her unique fingerprint, which engagingly blends the sounds and forms of the East with different aspects of the rhythmic West. And it’s not to imply that her music wanders with no direction: There’s an intelligence and purpose behind her various styles, but they sometimes produce very different feelings and moods.

Those differences are undeniable though. If you’ve seen Dang perform at any point since she returned to Baltimore in the summer of 2007, chances are you’ve seen various sets. At first, she explored traditional Hindustani classical music forms and Sikh hymns, playing seated on the floor with effects pedals and sequencer. Perhaps you’ve seen her add a haunting frisson when playing with Nathan Bell, where her delicate sitar puts a spectral resonance behind Bell’s contemplative twang.

But if you caught her at Whartscape 2009, you saw a young woman in a pink and blue dress bounce around the stage having an undeniable blast singing songs that radiated a pop sensibility. The melodies powering them were still Eastern-inspired, only the rhythmic pulse was a bit more dance-friendly, the results outwardly euphoric instead of inwardly meditative, and the appeal infectious.

“It was so much fun,” Dang says of Whartscape 2009, the first time she played what she calls her “all pop” set. The 26-year-old Dang sits in a booth at a Station North coffeeshop warming up from a chilly mid-December morning. And Dang—taking a moment from a frenetic end-of-year that has her leaving her job, prepping for the release of her debut album, and moving out of her apartment in preparation for a 2011 U.S. tour and trip to India—wistfully recalls that 2009 summer show where she got the chance to stand up and dance during her own set.

“At that point, I typically had to sit down for a good portion of my set, if not all of it, because of the way that I played sitar, and I just sort of put all my gear on the floor,” she says. “And so at that point I had never stood during a set. And it was the first time that was, like, cool—I’m just up here with a microphone and an iPod basically.”

All parts of Dang show up on Hukam, her debut release being put out by Ehse Records, Stewart Mostofsky’s indispensable local imprint. It’s seven tracks of seven different moods, all of which are indisputably Dang. “It starts off with this experimental track and moves into this pop song with a B-more club beat, and then it goes into a hymn that’s very heavily produced and then it goes into a pop track, and then into more some ambient areas,” Dang says of the album. “I’d love to do an album that’s all house and dance songs and one that’s more pop and one that’s just hymns that are electronically produced.”

For Dang, though, the album is but a teaser to what she’s capable of creating. It’s a map of where she’s come from, but barely an indication to where she may be heading next. “I am happy with the album but the earliest track on the record is two years old now,” Dang says. “And I am just so ready to move on creatively. I feel like with the record each song is so different that I feel like I’m just scratching at the surface of my ideas.”

For a listener, Hukam’s little-bit-of-everything is a refreshing jolt. A track such as the instantly catchy “Manali,” with its reverberating beat production and looped sitar lines, receives an extra boost of pop joy coming after the album opening “Interlace,” a dirge-like gossamer of vocal syllables and sitar notes that suggest the wide-open musical expanse this album is going to cover. “Interlace” is an ideal introductory sonic calibration, an indication that what’s to follow is going to take the traditional and tweak it, sometimes a little bit, sometimes a great deal. Brain excursions such as “Amorphous Matter” explore long-form, circular jams while hybrid pop standouts such as “Treasure” and “Where Nothing Grows” are polished enough to be hyped by music blogs.

In fact, Hukam’s idiosyncratic pop touch may be its blessing and its curse. Dang’s omnivorous taste in East and West and her seamless ability to make something personal and unique from their hybridization is inevitably going to earn Hukam comparisons to M.I.A., as if American pop ears can only compare one artist of subcontintental-Indian extraction to another. And while there are certainly worse artists to be compared to, Dang and her music are so much more interesting than that—and where she wants to take her art feels more eclectic.

Dang was raised in Glen Arm, and she grew up playing sitar and singing. Like many young musicians, she got into music through the church—or in her case, the temple. “My family wasn’t particularly musical, but my religion—my family’s Sikh, and in the Sikh religion the services are just entirely mostly music,” Dang says. “And so hymns are sung continuously. So a lot of kids in the kids’ programs at the temple, you kind of learn all that stuff. I started to get interested in singing through temple, and also growing up I went to religious retreats and summer camps, basically, and learned more hymns there. But then when I was about 12, I think, my mom said, ‘I want you to learn sitar.’ And she had found a teacher in the area, and so I started taking lessons. And he also taught Hindustani classical vocal music as well as tabla, but I just started vocals and sitar with this teacher.”

> Email Bret McCabe