Creativity Quote by Ikue Mori

Ikue Mori is arguing for the soul of electronic music without begging for legitimacy. The line draws a bright boundary between two stereotypes: the electronic performer as a passive operator (push button, receive music) and the musician as a physical, responsive presence in the room. She insists on the second, but she does it by rewriting what an instrument is. Not wood and strings, not keys and valves, but a system that answers back.

The phrasing is telling: "still think" signals an ongoing skepticism around her practice, a debate she has had to outlast. The slight defensiveness is strategic; it acknowledges the cliché (electronics are automatic) while refusing it. "Interactive and alive" is the hinge. She’s not claiming laptops have feelings; she’s describing a feedback loop of gesture, risk, and surprise - the qualities audiences instinctively read as "real performance". In improvised and experimental scenes, that aliveness is currency. Mori, who moved from punk-inflected drumming into the downtown New York avant-garde and later laptop improvisation, knows that credibility often comes from perceived bodily effort. She smuggles that effort back into the circuit.

"Manipulation" is the quietly radical word. It rejects the idea that electronic sound is prepackaged, and it frames control as tactile, time-based craft. The subtext: virtuosity can live in parameter shifts, in listening and steering, not just in finger speed. She’s asking us to hear electronics not as playback but as a playable ecology - something you enter, provoke, and negotiate in real time.