Creativity Quote by Tom Jenkinson

Jenkinson is describing a small technical move that reads like a manifesto: stop treating instruments as job titles. A bass guitar is supposed to hold down the floor, not sing the lead. By “playing all the melodies” on bass while chasing a “keyboard sound,” he’s pointing at the core Squarepusher impulse: virtuosity used less as rock-guy flex and more as a jailbreak from genre habits.

The phrasing matters. “Kind of” signals curiosity over dogma; he’s not claiming the bass becomes a synth, he’s chasing the sensation of one. That chase is the subtext of late-90s/early-2000s electronic music’s arms race: the studio makes anything possible, so the interesting question becomes what you can make feel possible in the hands. Jenkinson’s context is Warp-era experimentation, when IDM and drum’n’bass were simultaneously hyper-digital and weirdly nostalgic for “played” complexity. His solution is perversely analog: mimic the machine’s clean, percussive articulation from an instrument associated with warmth and thud.

There’s also an identity play. If keyboards are the emblem of electronic authorship, moving that voice onto bass collapses a cultural divide between “real musicianship” and “programming,” a divide that haunted dance music discourse. He’s effectively saying: I can do the synthetic with strings, and I can do the human at machine speed. The intent isn’t novelty; it’s reassigning power in the arrangement, letting the low-end become the narrator instead of the infrastructure.