Time & Perspective Quote by Tom Jenkinson

Tom Jenkinson’s line reads like a quiet rebuke to the way electronic music is usually archived: in immaculate files, endlessly revisable, built for headphones and metadata. By saying his “history” is playing live, he’s refusing the standard career narrative where the record is the evidence and the tour is the marketing. For an artist whose work is often associated with technical precision and studio wizardry, it’s a pointed flip: the real document is the night itself, the room, the risk, the version that can’t be perfectly recalled or re-exported.

There’s an ego-check inside it, too. “Not writing or recording” isn’t anti-composition; it’s anti-fixation. Jenkinson frames authorship less as possession of a catalog and more as a practice that keeps changing. Live performance becomes a form of truth-telling because it’s where control slips a little: hardware glitches, tempos drift, the crowd’s energy forces decisions. That vulnerability is the opposite of the polished, frozen “definitive” take that streaming platforms reward.

Context matters: Jenkinson came up in a culture where electronic acts were often dismissed as pushing play. Claiming live performance as his history is also a demand for legitimacy on his own terms, not rock’s. It’s a declaration that the art isn’t the artifact; it’s the encounter. When he’s gone, the legacy he cares about isn’t a discography so much as a trail of nights that people remember differently, which is exactly the point.