Creativity Quote by Tom Jenkinson

There’s a stubborn modesty baked into “I’m basically a musician,” and that’s exactly why it lands coming from Tom Jenkinson, better known as Squarepusher: an artist whose whole brand has often been filed under “anything but basic.” The line works as a quiet refusal of the categories that critics and fans love to paste onto electronic music. He’s been treated as producer, programmer, gear obsessive, bass virtuoso, IDM technician, even a kind of math-rock prankster hiding inside a sequencer. Jenkinson counters with an almost shrugging self-definition that drags the conversation back to first principles: whatever the tools, the job is music.

The intent is practical, even defensive. In a culture that fetishizes process, software, and micro-genres, “basically” is a reset button. It strips away the mystique of the studio-as-laboratory and insists on an older legitimacy: the musician as someone who plays, listens, composes, sweats details, and aims for feeling as much as complexity. That small word also carries a wink. Jenkinson knows how ridiculous it sounds to call himself “basically” anything, given the dizzying intricacy of his work. The subtext is that virtuosity doesn’t require a traditional stage, and electronics don’t revoke musicianship.

Context matters: late-90s and 2000s electronic scenes were still litigating authenticity, with live performance and “real instruments” used as gatekeeping tokens. Jenkinson’s line sidesteps the trial. It’s not an apology for the machines; it’s a claim that the machines are beside the point.