There are people who have character and there are people who are characters. Coppe, the coolest musician you've never heard of, is both.

To make her trippy hip-hop, Coppe has traveled the world.

With her short blond pigtails standing on end from her head like antennas, Coppe is tuned into her own private and totally groovy soundtrack. It would be tempting to label it chill-out music -- except Coppe's intensity and generosity could hardly be called chilled. It is more like trip hop, with the emphasis on "trip." Like Portishead or Moloko, Coppe owes much to the dance floor -- but is not of it. Categorizing her as an electronica artist doesn't do justice to the spicy passion and playfulness of "Peppermint," her latest release. "Vadim," for example, a paean to the producer/DJ who collaborated on the cut, opens with the scratchy warmth of a vinyl record, a sonorous heat that permeates the whole album.

Sitting in the lobby of a hotel where she stays while in town, Coppe is the picture of sublime eccentricity, from the gem-encrusted Mickey Mouse earring piercing her nose to the schoolboy backpack stuffed with CDs that she gives out by the handful.

Though a Tokyo native with a home in the United States, hotel rooms throughout the world have been transformed into makeshift recording studios for Coppe's musical adventures. Much of the time, she jets from one culture capital to the next, looking for the perfect bleeps and beats to bring her musical vision to life.

"I like working with geniuses," she says.

And indeed her list of collaborators reads like a who's who of electronica: DJ Vadim, Kris Weston from the Orb, and Warp Record's Plaid are among the artists who have added to Coppe's musical alchemy.

"Peppermint" was released on her own Mango and Sweet Rice label. Lacking big-time distribution, it has been virtually unheard of beyond a small circle of hipsters. Her parents' indulgence has allowed Coppe to produce her music in a financial cocoon.

"I'm very spoiled," she says with a charming smile that seems to completely contradict her words. "I'm very self-centered. A bitch, really. But I'm pure. I've basically got a good heart."

Free from the financial worries that plague most other artists, Coppe has almost managed to bring off the rarest of feats in the pop-music world: to produce music that is art first and a commodity second.

"I couldn't change my music to make money," she says. "It would be worse than making love to someone you didn't really love. It would be 10,000 times worse than that."

Given the list of artists that she has worked with, it would be tempting to see Coppe as just another conduit for someone else's ideas. But "Peppermint," despite the various producers, has a distinct sound that can only be described as "Coppe."

"When I work with different people, I realize I have so many doors in my head," she says. "Each one is a totally different Coppe, but still Coppe."

Even as a child, she was recognized as a talented composer. After winning a song contest while in elementary school, one of the judges took her under his wing. Whenever she wrote a particularly outstanding piece, he would arrange for it to be recorded. One ended up winning the Japanese Grammy for Best Children's Song, which brought her a good deal of attention from the entertainment industry and she became a sort of tarento. This in turn led to many opportunities in radio. (She continues to produce a show for Shibuya FM from her home in Arizona.)

As she was spinning discs she says she was silently questioning the way the music was put together. "I guess without knowing it, I've always been a producer."

There was also a short-lived attempt at normalcy, involving marriage and a golf-course business, leaving Coppe with a home studio in Arizona and a greater sense of her talents and what she wanted to do with them.

"Some of my radio shows [in Japan] were really highly rated, but I left anyway. Arizona gave me time to think about what I was as Coppe and what I wanted to do, and what I found was that I had to do music."

Although Coppe is a skilled instrumentalist herself, of late her focus has been her voice.

"My favorite thing," she says, "is to buy effects boxes and hook my voice up and try every setting.

"I want to use my voice as an instrument. When I work with Kris from the Orb, I just record my voice and put it on this cutting board and marinate it with his spice. Then we cook it or bake it together. I want to push the boundary, to do things that no one has thought of doing."

Family matters have brought Coppe back to Tokyo for the moment. Even in the midst of family trauma, however, she is still drawn to the world of sound. She's been sampling respirators and heartbeats amplified through stethoscopes.

Most recently, her Tokyo hotel room has been the venue for a collaboration with hip-hop DJ Kensei on a series of tracks she calls "dark and very Mo Wax." She is also putting together a band to bring the Coppe experience live, so perhaps she won't remain unknown for much longer.