Q048: What first brought you to music? Were there particular things that influenced you as a child, as an adult?
A048: As a child I was greatly excited
by the drone of a tambura I heard on a TV documentary about Indian classical
music, by musique concrete and an electronic music piece by Stockhausen
that I heard on the radio. All of these things excited me because of their
similarity to the audio hallucinations I constantly heard in my ears. I
was surprised to see that these sounds were accepted as music. Later when
I discovered and fell in love with sixties and early seventies hard rock
and progressive rock, I imagined to myself a fusion of Deep Purple and Stockhausen's
electronic music. I searched for something like this but as I could never
find it, I decided to make my own version. That was my first step into music.
From my teens I listened to every genre of music, but I was particularly
taken with traditional music from Europe, the Middle East and Asia, and
with troubadour music. Ethnic music would continually surprise me with its
ancientness and its wonderfulness. Recently I've been blown away by Sardinian
male polyphony. It is a true miracle rendered through human voice.