Science & Tech Quote by Ikue Mori

You can hear the origin story of an entire aesthetic in Mori's plainspoken chain of events: somebody gives her a drum machine, somebody else gives her a deadline, and suddenly "programming" stops being a technical chore and becomes a new kind of touch. The line is disarmingly modest, but the subtext is a quiet refusal of the romantic myth that musicians are born, not built. Her gateway isn't a conservatory or a divine lightning bolt; it's an object passed hand to hand, a social nudge, a practical task. Art arrives as logistics.

What makes the quote work is how it recasts authorship. Mori doesn't frame the drum machine as a cold substitute for "real" instruments. She frames it as a site of curiosity and agency: "I really liked programming". That single preference flips the usual hierarchy. The machine isn't an adversary to human feeling; it's a language she wants to speak. In the late 20th-century downtown scene, where punk abrasion and avant-garde rigor often shared the same tiny room, this matters. The drum machine isn't just a tool; it's a cultural permission slip to experiment outside institutional gatekeeping.

There's also an implicit politics of access. Drum machines were portable, relatively affordable, and indifferent to whether you played "correctly". Mori's interest isn't in virtuosity as spectacle, but in systems, patterns, and the compositional power of choosing rules. The repetition in her phrasing ("somebody... somebody... really... really") mirrors the loop-based logic she's stepping into: a life rerouted by iteration.