Art & Creativity Quote by Ikue Mori

Mori frames composition less as virtuoso self-expression than as a kind of seeing with sound. Comparing music-making to painting isn’t a cute metaphor here; it’s a practical description of method. “To compose in a more visual way” suggests an artist building texture, space, and color first, not chasing the usual milestones of melody and hook. It’s a quiet rebuke to the idea that music has to narrate, resolve, or even “perform” in a traditional sense. The emphasis is on arrangement as image: layers, negative space, grain, contrast.

Then she drops the most disarming artistic manifesto possible: “It’s the music that I want to hear.” That line reads humble, almost shrugging, but it’s also fiercely sovereign. Mori isn’t positioning herself as a spokesperson for a scene or a market; she’s asserting an inward compass that sidesteps trend, genre policing, and the expectation that a composer should justify their choices with theory. The “bottom line” language feels deliberately unromantic, like she’s grounding experimental practice in something anyone can understand: taste.

Her list of sources - books, movies, paintings - signals a post-genre sensibility that fits her broader context: an artist who came up through downtown/experimental circuits where collage, noise, and improvisation blur the borders between disciplines. The subtext is permission. You don’t need a single sacred tradition to make serious music; you need a clear appetite and a willingness to translate what moves you across mediums into sound.