Creativity Quote by Daisy Berkowitz

A tiny gear-note like this is really a statement about authorship. Daisy Berkowitz frames a technical preference as a philosophical split: Trent (read: Trent Reznor, with the Nine Inch Nails home-studio ethos) “records guitars direct,” bypassing the room, the speaker, the air. It’s clean, controllable, and infinitely editable - a guitar signal that can be bent into something almost synthetic. In the 90s industrial-rock context, that choice isn’t just convenience; it’s an aesthetic of precision and domination. The instrument becomes raw material for sound design.

“I’ve always preferred playing through an amplifier” pushes back with something more human and contingent. An amp is friction: tubes, noise, volume, feedback, the way a note changes when you move your body an inch. It’s performance, not just capture. Berkowitz is defending the messy chain of cause and effect that makes rock feel like it’s happening in real space, with consequences.

The subtext is interpersonal, too. The sentence sets up a gentle “whereas” instead of a takedown, but it sketches the creative power dynamic of bandmaking: one person building a controllable sonic architecture, another insisting on the physicality of playing. In a culture that increasingly fetishizes the studio as the real instrument, Berkowitz signals allegiance to the older contract between musician and listener: you can hear the room, the risk, the imperfect decision that can’t be fully undone. That’s not nostalgia; it’s a claim about what counts as authenticity when technology makes perfection cheap.