Creativity Quote by Tom Jenkinson

“Really suffocated” is an unusually bodily word for a piece of studio gear, and that’s the point: Tom Jenkinson is describing a creative process that stopped feeling like play and started feeling like a room with the windows shut. In electronic music, the sequencer is supposed to be liberation - perfect timing, endless recall, the ability to stack ideas at machine speed. Jenkinson flips that assumption. The tool that promises infinity can quietly narrow your choices to whatever fits the grid, whatever loops cleanly, whatever can be nudged into quantized obedience.

The intent reads like a refusal of convenience-as-aesthetic. Jenkinson’s work (as Squarepusher) is obsessed with velocity, micro-detail, and a kind of human extremity inside digital sound. A sequencer can make complexity easy, but it can also make it predictable: patterns become default, repetition becomes ergonomic, and the music starts serving the software’s logic instead of the artist’s. “Starting to feel” matters, too. This isn’t a grand manifesto; it’s the creeping realization that workflow can become worldview.

The subtext is about agency. Electronic musicians are often framed as people who “let the machines do it,” a tired stereotype Jenkinson has spent a career complicating with virtuoso playing and aggressive sound design. Saying he felt suffocated is a small act of rebellion against the idea that precision equals progress. It’s also a reminder that technology doesn’t just expand what you can do; it pressures you to do what it makes easiest. In that squeeze, opting for mess, performance, and risk isn’t nostalgia - it’s oxygen.