There was blood on me," says Victoria Bergsman in gently accented English, big doe eyes darting beneath her dark fringe. "Blood on my shoes. I felt like I had blood all over me. I think it was the craziest thing I have ever seen in my life."

If you know Victoria Bergsman, it's fair to say you probably know her best not for tales of Lars Von Trier-esque gore nightmares, but for her lilting vocal cameo on Young Folks - the song by those nice Swedish men Peter, Bjorn
and John that reinstated the jaunty whistle to the arsenal of popular music hooks. Young Folks cracked the UK Top 20, melted hearts across the world, and marked out Victoria as a star in the making. Cutesy indie ubiquity beckoned.

But Victoria was headed in another direction. Earlier this year, she and her recording partner Andreas Söderström, visited Pakistan to complete East Of Eden, the second album recorded under her solo title, Taken By Trees. The orgy of blood-spilling she's talking about took place as part of Ashure, a Muslim day of mourning that coincided with their visit. In a small village north of Lahore, devout Shia gathered to beat themselves with chains hooked with knives to grieve the martyred Husayn ibn Ali, grandson of the prophet Mohammed. Victoria saw it up close, filming footage that would become part of a short 11-minute film that's packaged with the album and streamed on National Geographic's website.

If it's hard to imagine why a demure Scandinavian songstress might choose to travel halfway round the world to watch young men flay their backs to ribbons, it pays to know a little about Victoria. Following over a decade singing with Swedish indie pop outfit the Concretes, she packed it in, and considered quitting music altogether. "I felt so sick of the whole music industry," she told an interviewer. "I thought I might never sing again." Gradually, though, songs started blooming again; but this time, they would grow her way, no one else's.

Late last year Bergsman completed some demos, and decided to take it abroad. A fan of Abida Parveen, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and the devotional sounds of Sufi Islam, qawwali music, Bergsman decided she wanted to complete East Of Eden in Pakistan, using local musicians.

"The way they use rhythms and scales feels exciting to me," she says. "India felt a little overdone in terms of musicians recording there. It didn't feel as difficult or mysterious as Pakistan."

India, mind you, might have been a little safer. The 2008 hotel bombing in Islamabad and the growing influence of the Taliban in rural areas has made Pakistan an unlikely tourist destination, let alone the natural choice to finish off an indie pop record.

"We talked to the Swedish embassy and they didn't understand why we wanted to go. And then we spoke to the Pakistan embassy and they didn't understand either."

Were you worried?

"Yes, very. The last week before we went, Andreas got cold feet.

I felt like we couldn't go. Then he phoned me up and said, 'I can't miss this opportunity.'"

First, Bergsman made contact with a Sufi musician through the internet, who promised them that he could find them lodgings and put them in touch with suitable musicians. On their arrival in Lahore, though, they found their guide had grasped rather the wrong end of the stick.

"He'd booked us in a super-fancy hotel, and I'd underlined several times I didn't want to stay in a big hotel because of all the bombings that were all over the news at that time."

Victoria also faced a quite different peril, thanks to her status as an unmarried woman. "Well, I accidentally said that me and Andreas were friends, not married, and that made me desirable, maybe. Everyone in the room started coming up to me and asking for my email ... " The pair stayed one night, and fled. Stranded in the chaos of Lahore, Victoria dialled a number for a hotel that she'd read about, which put on Sufi music nights. A young man answered. "'Oh, my father Malik, he has all the contacts you need,' he said, and he came over to pick us up, which was very sweet."

Malik, the hotel owner, took the pair under his wing, inviting them into his house and introducing them to local musicians. Initially, Victoria had hoped to record with women "but there were no women available to record. The only woman I met out there, that I spoke to, was Malik's wife."

With a team of 20 musicians assembled, Victoria and Andreas began recording in the rooms and terraces of Malik's house, using two microphones and a laptop. It was far from smooth going. At first, the men were reluctant to take musical orders from a woman.

"They didn't say hello to me at first," she remembers. "But later on they would begin to greet me."

Recording would take place in bursts, as sometimes the electricity would cut out for several hours at a time. "So we would record for two hours a day and wait until it came back. You have to make something valuable out of that time when the electricity is out. There's something beautiful about that."

And it's hard to deny that East Of Eden has come out beautifully. Where most experiments like this feel like a bit of a hack job, a touch of sitar bolted on to make things sound exotic, songs like Watch The Waves and The Greyest Love Of All seamlessly meld Victoria's serene vocals with weaving flutes, chimes and bubbling tabla.

Also present on the record is Noah Lennox, AKA Panda Bear of Animal Collective.

"Person Pitch was my album of the year when that came out," says Victoria of Lennox's lush, aquatic 2007 solo album. "I felt my song Anna could work with his vocals, so I took the chance and asked if he would like to sing on it and he said he was honored. But that didn't feel enough of Noah really." So East Of Eden also features the pair dueting on a cover of Animal Collective's My Girls, renamed My Boys in dedication to Victoria's boyfriend and her cat, Chico.

Victoria is aware of how it can look a bit funny when western musicians ship out to the third world to get their inspiration.

"I had to really think about it: am I going to be looked at as someone exploiting people? But in the end I felt like we did something together, something special. I felt we all learned a lot." Victoria and Andreas also helped the musicians make their own recordings: "A few of them wanted their own solo albums!"

Now, though, she's back in Stockholm, and all she has is the album.

"It felt bad leaving," she says. "People were so repressed and poor; every day seemed like such a struggle, especially for women. That I could leave and go back to my relatively safe home, that made me feel like shit. I think
I had to bring something beautiful home with me. Otherwise it would have been unbearable."

• East Of Eden is out Mon 7 Sep