Art & Creativity Quote by Bill Laswell

Laswell is refusing a tired culture war: the idea that circuitry cancels soul. Coming from a producer-bassist who’s spent decades stitching together dub, funk, ambient, and global traditions, the line reads less like a defense of “electronic” and more like a correction to a category mistake. We keep treating computers as a genre, or worse, a personality type. Laswell treats them as a studio instrument: another set of hands.

The intent is slyly radical. By saying “exactly the same,” he isn’t claiming a drum machine feels identical to a hand drum in timbre. He’s claiming the human part of music doesn’t live in the material; it lives in choices. What gets repeated, what gets left empty, how tension is paced, how a bassline leans into the pocket, how a mix breathes. A computer can’t supply taste on its own, but it can be an extension of it, just like an amplifier or a tape edit or a reverb chamber once was. The warmth people miss is usually a bundle of production cues - saturation, swing, imperfection - that can be created, faked, exaggerated, or stripped away in any medium.

Subtext: the “coldness” critique is often nostalgia dressed up as ethics. It’s also a way to police who gets to be “real” - which scenes count as authentic, which labor counts as musicianship. Laswell’s point lands because his career is proof: the same human urge to groove, to trance, to collide influences, can move through wires without losing its pulse.