Fluid Rustle is the 1979 album on which the German bassist and composer Eberhard Weber wrote for an unusual quintet of bass, vibraphone, guitar and two wordless voices. It is also the record on which Bill Frisell first appeared on ECM, some years before his first album as a leader there. The result is four slowly unfolding pieces, just under forty minutes in all, in which melody and texture count for more than solos.
Weber plays his electric bass and the bulbul tarang, an Indian stringed instrument with keys. Gary Burton, who had already worked with Weber on Ring and Passengers, plays vibraharp and marimba. Frisell plays guitar and balalaika. The voices belong to Norma Winstone, here on her first ECM date outside Azimuth, and Bonnie Herman. All the compositions are Weber's. The session took place in January 1979 at Tonstudio Bauer in Ludwigsburg, with Martin Wieland as engineer and Manfred Eicher as producer. The cover design is by Maja Weber.
The opening Quiet Departures fills more than seventeen minutes. It moves from an atmospheric start into a bright vibraphone solo, then back to a passage where electric guitar and the two voices return, as if remembered. The voices sing no words, and Weber uses them as another layer of colour next to the vibraphone. The title track opens out into a dreamlike, ecstatic section, while A Pale Smile blends guitar and vibraphone and leaves room for a quiet, songful bass solo. The short Visible Thoughts closes with bowed bass over percussive breathing and whispers, the breath tightening until the music fades.
Reviewing the album in DownBeat, Michael Zipkin wrote that it "paints tone poems in cloudy, pastel hues". Looking back on it for ECM Reviews in 2011, Tyran Grillo heard the arrival of the voices as "an exciting tectonic shift in Weber's geology". Later writers have treated it as the album that first introduced Frisell to a wide audience, and John Kelman of All About Jazz devoted a rediscovery piece to it on those grounds.
This is the CD edition of ECM 1137, first released in May 1979.
