Musica: arte del suono organizzato, o, più specificatamente, arte del produrre significati e sensazioni, più o meno complessi - e comunque di natura volontaria - organizzando suoni e silenzio.

Suono (dal latino sonus): la sensazione prodotta dalla vibrazione di un corpo in oscillazione.

from Wikipedia

When we talk about Fernando Grillo, we can't ignore the evaluation of these concepts. The Maestro's work actually goes beyond the simple vertical/horizontal organization of sounds. He focuses on a deep research of the sounds' internal relationship in their harmonic and sub-harmonic components. This research overcomes the common idea of music and enters into a dimension where any sound vibration becomes the perceptive fulcrum and impulse. This attitude overcomes the relationship between consonance/dissonance and the melodic/harmonic categories: they not only lose their functionality, they become unnecessary, within a system based on the ancestral and spiritual practice of the sensitive act. Fluvine is a historical album, recorded in a two-hour jam session, meaning that the composition is in progress, with its own background and reflective bases. The author creates a new framework and function in new audio-perceptive frames. The album was recorded in the Milan-based Ricordi studio and was published by the Cramps Record label in 1976. Today, it has been released in a CD version by Ampersand, becoming the symbol of this journey. The listener finds a work that is a composing pathway, an improvising attitude in progress, with its own research and development. The sound-object is fragmented during its continuous flow. It is re-composed and multiplied and the ear/subject of the listener is not only involved in an expanded and hyper-sensitive perceptive universe but also starts a journey in which every technical modality adopted by the author becomes an analytical journey, beyond the usual auditory practice. Nothing happens by chance. The technical choices, the adopted solutions and each produced sound wave are the result and variable of a careful study, continuously developing itself, instant by instant. And this sound "landmark" sets a new relationship between the musician/actor, sound-object and listener/referee, in a kind of audio-theatre that, though without its visual component, has a very strong impact and appears as a spiritual and inner journey. In it, the sound and the research, the reflection about its components, the destructive practice and the support of the microphones altering the relationship between significant/meaning become the metaphor of the author himself. They surround the work with a sense of continuous spiritual growth: the instrument becomes one with the performer, like a mystical and almost ascetic union. In such case, according to the aims of this work, the instrumental technique or the innovation is not important. Nevertheless, Maestro Grillo is one of the most refined inspirers of the rebirth of the modern double bass. The important element is the incredible simplicity of the adopted solutions, showing all the perceptive potentials of the performance, such as Fluvine no. 3, which was originally the opening piece, recorded with a Barcus-Berry contact microphone, placed on the bridge of the instrument, where the left hand never comes into contact with the fret board and the sound is totally created by the bow and the open strings. This is why, briefly, but ingeniously, Karl Heinz Stockhausen used to say: “Fernando Grillo, the Buddha of double bass!” An album that, thirty years later, still represents the future...

The author of this review wishes to clarify that, though the respects Grillo's work and research, he does completely disagree with Mr Grillo's positions and attitude, during his recent participation in some topics in a famous Italian forum dedicated to the double bass