Daily Inspiration Quote by Luc Ferrari

Ferrari’s line lands like an offhand shrug, but it’s really a manifesto for listening in the age of broadcast noise. “You turned on the radio” isn’t just a setting; it’s an instruction about agency. You don’t “go to” radio the way you go to a concert hall. You flip a switch and accept whatever spills out: pop, propaganda, weather, static, a voice selling you something, a song you didn’t ask for. That “all kinds of things” is the point: the world arrives as an uncontrolled collage.

As a composer who helped define musique concrete and later pushed it toward something more narrative and intimate, Ferrari is staking out a different musical ethics. Instead of treating recorded sound as raw material to be purified into “art,” he’s drawn to the ordinary encounter - the accidental, the messy simultaneity, the social life embedded in transmissions. The radio becomes a model for composition: montage without hierarchy, meaning produced by adjacency, not by a single authored melody.

There’s subtextual politics here, too. Mid-century radio was a mass medium of comfort and control, a domestic pipeline for culture industries and state messaging. Ferrari’s phrase implies a listener caught in that stream, learning to sort signal from seduction. Yet he doesn’t moralize; he notes the sensory fact of abundance. The brilliance is its casualness: a single sentence that smuggles in a whole theory of modern attention, where “music” competes with everything else and the act of listening is already a kind of editing.