Art & Creativity Quote by Tom Jenkinson

Jenkinson frames music-making less as self-expression than as self-administered brain surgery. The casual phrasing ("you know?") is a feint: it invites you into something intimate, then immediately narrows the room until only one appetite matters - sound that satisfies his own ear. In an era where musicians are trained to narrate their work as identity, activism, or brand, he insists on a bluntly private standard: what he wants to hear. That refusal is its own cultural stance.

The line "I don't think about anything" isn’t anti-intellectual; it’s anti-distraction. Jenkinson is describing flow as austerity, a temporary suspension of the social self. No audience in the room, no market notes, no taste-making committee, not even a coherent storyline about what the track is "about". Just the sensory goal. It reads like a defense of experimental music that doesn’t apologize for being difficult, because difficulty here is a tool, not a posture.

Then he lands the real thesis: "I want my head to be constantly being rearranged". The subtext is craving novelty so intense it borders on dependency - the dopamine loop of surprise, the itch for unfamiliar structures, timbres, rhythms. "Rearranged" implies not decoration but rewiring: music as a mechanism for destabilizing habit. Contextually, it fits a late-90s-to-now electronic tradition (from drill-and-bass to IDM) where progress is measured by how effectively a track scrambles your predictive brain. Jenkinson isn’t chasing transcendence; he’s chasing cognitive motion, and he’s honest about the selfishness of that chase.