Art & Creativity Quote by Tom Jenkinson

Jenkinson is rejecting the polite role of “soundtrack guy” and staking out a more aggressive idea of what music can do: not decorate a room, but rewire it. Coming from the mind behind Squarepusher, that distinction matters. His work isn’t built to sit behind a scene and flatter whatever mood is already in progress; it’s engineered to create the scene, to make listeners feel like the air pressure changed. It’s an artist describing music as infrastructure, not accessory.

The subtext is a small war against passivity. “Complement already existing ones” is the language of service: background music, playlist culture, the endless algorithmic wash designed to keep you productive, calm, purchasable. Jenkinson’s phrasing implies that atmosphere is something you can manufacture with intention and technique - sound design, bass weight, tempo violence, digital texture - not something you stumble into and then sweeten. It’s also a defense of difficulty: if the atmosphere is generated, you may have to enter it on the music’s terms.

Context-wise, this comes out of a late-90s/early-2000s electronic tradition that treated the studio like a lab and the club like a physics demo. Squarepusher’s hyper-detailed drum programming and elastic, often confrontational basslines don’t “fit” a space so much as they compete with it. The quote is a mission statement for electronic music as world-building: not ambient wallpaper, but an environment with teeth.