Creativity Quote by Ikue Mori

Ikue Mori calling her playing "like a drum machine" is less self-deprecation than a quiet flex: she’s staking a claim to a kind of precision that usually gets dismissed as cold. In a music culture that still romanticizes the messy "human" feel, "very mechanical" lands as provocation. It asks why we treat regularity as a deficit when repetition and control are the engines of so much ecstatic sound, from minimalism to techno.

The phrasing matters. "Come to think of it" has the offhand tone of an afterthought, like she’s catching herself telling the truth. That casualness defuses the loaded baggage around machines: soulless, artificial, fake. Mori’s career complicates that binary. Coming out of the downtown New York experimental scene and later moving into laptop-based performance, she’s lived through the era when electronic tools shifted from novelty to instrument. Her "mechanical" approach reads like an aesthetic decision shaped by gear, but not reduced to it: the point isn’t that she imitates a machine, it’s that she treats the machine as a standard to meet, then bend.

Subtextually, it’s also a comment on authorship. A drum machine suggests automation, pattern, program. Mori, a human, chooses the pattern and the pressure. She’s hinting at the paradox that the most "mechanical" music can be intensely personal, because it foregrounds intention over expressive theatrics. In her hands, the machine isn’t replacing the performer; it’s exposing what performance actually is: design, restraint, and time kept with unnerving honesty.