It's not every journeyman musician who stumbles into a collaboration with the most famous woman in the world. So it was with Mirwais Ahmadzai. The 39-year-old veteran of Paris' musical underground traveled from the disco-punk scene of the late '70s through the folk-pop realm and, after discovering drum'n'bass, out the other side into the world of electronic music. And then he met Madonna.

To be sure, the similarly single-monikered Mirwais (MEER-way) basks in the blonde glow of Miss Thing, but he's by no means her puppet. If the six tracks he produced for her Music, including the Grammy-nominated, disco-tech title track, signaled a new direction for French-fried pop funk, then his new solo full-length, Production (which came out in America at the end of February, nearly a year after its European release), flies down the freeway of musical freedom, dodging convention at every swerve.

"Disco Science", for example, acts as the album's lead seducer. Mirwais tastes the tweaked house music fashioned by such compatriots as Daft Punk and Cassius, then douses it in molasses, concocting a treacly dance-floor romp. (Its video, deemed too racy even for European TV, was directed by photographer Stephane Sednaoui, who introduced the producer to Madonna.) From there, he takes off into Vocoder pop land on "Naïve Song," rides the dub train on "Involution" and raises a toast to French maestro Serge Gainsbourg on "V.I. (The Last Words She Said Before Leaving)," proving that Mirwais is so much more than the man behind Miss M.

He sat down with MTV Radio's Curtis Waller to look back on his collaboration with Madonna and forward to U.S. reaction to his album.