Creativity Quote by Tom Jenkinson

Jenkinson’s line reads like an anti-Olympics manifesto for electronic music: stop sprinting in the same lane and go build a new track. Coming from a musician best known as Squarepusher, it lands as both strategy and self-defense. “Racing people” evokes the anxiety of scenes that turn art into a leaderboard - faster BPMs, weirder sound design, more technical chops, more novelty, more content. In that world, your worth is measured against peers and timelines, not against the internal logic of the work.

The pivot is “territory.” It’s not “style” or “genre,” which are social categories; it’s land, something you can occupy and cultivate. “Fresh” doesn’t mean trendy. It means unclaimed: a pocket of sound where the usual comparisons don’t even apply. The subtext is a refusal of the scarcity mindset that fuels creative burnout. If you’re always reacting, you’re always late; if you’re exploring, you get to define what “ahead” looks like.

There’s also a quiet critique of the market’s push for legibility. Racing requires shared rules and clear metrics. Fresh territory is messier, harder to sell, sometimes harder to even describe. Jenkinson is arguing for a kind of productive isolation: not ignorance of others, but a disciplined amnesia that keeps your compass from being hijacked by other people’s pace. In an era where musicians are nudged into constant comparison - streams, followers, micro-genres, release cycles - it’s a reminder that originality is often less a lightning bolt than a deliberate change of terrain.