Creativity Quote by Richard D. James

It sounds like a joke about randomness, but it lands because it’s also a manifesto. Richard D. James, better known as Aphex Twin, frames rhythm as something you can brute-force into existence: not by dutifully “programming” drums, but by physically attacking the interface until it coughs up a pattern that feels alive. The line shrugs off the romantic myth of inspiration while still protecting mystery. He’s not claiming genius; he’s claiming a method that looks like chaos from the outside and feels like instinct from the inside.

The intent is disarmingly practical. In electronic music, the keyboard is both instrument and control panel, and “hitting” it collapses the gap between body and machine. James’ best-known work thrives on microtiming, jitter, and the sense that the beat is constantly mutating. “Sometimes” matters: this isn’t a universal rule, it’s permission to bypass taste-policing and let accidents audition for the job of groove.

The subtext is a quiet rebuke to the idea that electronic music is sterile, over-calculated, or inhuman. He casts the studio not as a lab but as a place where mess, muscle memory, and misfires can be compositional tools. Contextually, it also fits the Aphex Twin persona: evasive, anti-explanatory, suspicious of interview narratives that try to turn sound into a neat origin story. By making the process sound almost stupidly simple, he keeps the focus where he wants it: on the result, and on rhythm as a felt phenomenon, not an intellectual one.