For several years I did not touch my instruments, I did not compose anything. But music pursued me in my dreams, dreams that marked me enough to write them down in a notebook; dreams that seemed to tell me that everything was not over, that beyond my disillusions, my disappointments and my fatigue, beyond my feeling of having said everything and of having reached the quick limits of my talent, there existed deep inside me, in strata of my mind that I could not reach in a conscious state, an intact fascination, an intact desire for creation.

Dreams where I would find lost floppy disks, filled with unfinished and forgotten pieces of my youth, that miraculously reconnected me to my past – and to a future. I would review them on my keyboard or in my Atari, in my teenage room, miraculously intact and unchanged, and it was like accessing a kind of eternity, a return not to the past but to a deep identity that should never have ceased to be.

Dreams where I wandered through villages or on the moors, hearing a mysterious, overwhelming music that escaped me when I woke up, that stirred up a thousand emotions buried inside me.

Dreams of grey cities where I wandered into deserted, dark music stores, where I discovered new and fascinating machines, sometimes modified, cobbled versions of synthesizers or drum machines that I already knew; they were dilapidated or covered with dust and dirt like artifacts unearthed after centuries of oblivion. Sometimes they were impossible to identify, prehistoric and gigantic machines like primitive computers, crammed with cables and countless knobs.

In one of these dreams I found myself, at night, in a high school or a boarding school; old buildings with a courtyard. There were many people there, as if for a party. I had in my hands a kind of groovebox found in a room of one of the buildings. I didn't really understand how it worked, but I had managed to record a few snippets of rather primitive electronic music, and that was enough to excite me, to fascinate me. Getting a few meager loops out of it seemed more exciting and mysterious than anything more ambitious done with a computer.

Sometimes, I still dreamed of mutant acoustic instruments, hybrids, with mysterious functioning, with a strange and bewitching sound: I remember a wind instrument resembling a clarinet, where while blowing you had to turn a wheel to vary the note; but also a kind of primitive zither, which I played while recording myself on a cassette, with an old tape recorder, improvising for a long time without caring to produce viable, saleable pieces, audible by anyone else but myself. Or from a small basement studio where I discovered a guitar and a bass of poor quality, thinking that I could still record songs with them, and that the sound would probably be catastrophic, but that by drowning it in reverb or other effects it could give something strange, minimalist, distant.

The important thing was not the final work; it was the process itself. This return to primitiveness. I knew when I was recording in this dream that the sound would be terrible, but that was what I wanted; a return to the primitive recording conditions of my adolescence and even childhood, since the tape recorder that had been used to record my very first songs, when I was about thirteen or fourteen years old, was also the one that my parents had used to record me, when I was very small, learning to speak. This tape recorder haunted me: in another dream, I was in a dimly lit room, as if on a rainy day, and I was listening to music on an old cassette recorder, similar to the one I had as a child – only bigger, even more primitive. The music was synthetic, very soaring, repetitive, hypnotic.