Creativity Quote by Tom Jenkinson

Jenkinson is quietly rejecting the laptop-era fantasy that electronic music is best experienced as private headphone art, hermetically sealed from the room. The line about not pretending he's "just in my bedroom making a track" is a shot at a certain posture of authenticity: the producer as solitary genius, communing with machines while everyone else politely watches. He frames that pose as a kind of fraud once you step onstage. A gig, in his telling, isn't a public playback session; it's a live social contract.

The word "always" matters. It's not just a preference, it's an ethic. Coming from an artist associated with hyper-detailed, often brainy electronic composition, the insistence on communication carries subtext: complexity doesn't have to mean distance. He's arguing that even the most meticulously programmed music can (and should) behave like a conversation, not a lecture.

Context does the rest. Electronic performance has long wrestled with legibility: what, exactly, is "live" when the tools are screens, sequencers, and prebuilt patterns? Jenkinson answers by shifting the measure of liveness away from visible virtuosity and toward responsiveness. "Feedback" isn't only volume and applause; it's pacing, tension, silence, the micro-decisions that happen when you feel a room lean in or drift away.

It's also a modestly political claim about power. Bedroom production culture democratized music-making, but it also normalized isolation. Jenkinson is insisting that the point of gathering is collective energy, mutual adjustment, and risk - the thing streaming can imitate but never quite reproduce.