Creativity Quote by Sean Booth

Taste is Booth's polite way of ending an argument he knows can't be won on specs. Coming from one half of Autechre - a project synonymous with hyper-controlled sound design - the shrug is strategic: it refuses the audiophile fantasy that there is a single correct, measurable hierarchy of "better". He frames taste as the irreducible final judge, not because thinking is pointless, but because listening is a bodily, culturally trained response. You can talk about bit depth and noise floors all day; the moment a track hits, the verdict happens somewhere less verbal.

The second line slips in the real manifesto: "to have it all there is basically best". That's an anti-curation stance in an era obsessed with cleanup. Hiss isn't defended as retro fetish or lo-fi cosplay; it's treated as collateral, sometimes even as evidence of completeness. If the choice is between a sterilized file and a version that includes the mess of its capture or transmission, Booth wants the one that preserves the whole event. The subtext is distrust of the "restoration" mindset that scrubs away context to sell purity.

Read in the long shadow of electronic music's format wars - vinyl warmth, CD clarity, streaming compression - Booth is quietly siding with texture and contingency. Not every artifact is sacred, but the impulse to delete every imperfection can flatten the very character experimental music is built to explore.