Art & Creativity Quote by Arto Lindsay

Arto Lindsay is describing a familiar avant-garde prank: smuggling the “obvious” into a context that makes it feel illegible. The intent isn’t just eclecticism for its own sake; it’s to break the listener’s sorting system. By “deliberately used,” he’s rejecting the romantic myth of inspiration and admitting to collage as method, almost like a producer admitting the seams. Brazilian, African, and Asian elements aren’t treated as tourist stamps but as rhythmic and timbral technologies - ways to reorganize time, groove, and texture inside a downtown New York art-music frame.

The subtext is a critique of how audiences (and gatekeepers) decide what counts as influence. “Now people can hear that” lands like an indictment: once a scene catches up, it rewrites the past as if the references were always audible. At the time, the same materials “sounded so abstract” because the surrounding language - no-wave noise, post-punk abrasion, dissonant guitar approaches - scrambled the expected cues. Listeners weren’t refusing the influences; they were missing the map that would let them recognize them.

Context matters: Lindsay’s era prized the confrontation between “high” conceptualism and “low” dance impulse, between global rhythm and Western rock aggression. He’s pointing to a lag in cultural perception: the music was already hybrid, already global, but it took critics and fans years to develop ears for it. In that gap, abstraction isn’t absence of meaning; it’s meaning delivered without subtitles.