The three-LP box set Guitar Music from ECM, released in 1981, was conceived by ECM’s French branch as more than a sampler. Coordinated by Hans Wendl and Gérard Desfoux, it gathers seven guitarists whose six- and twelve-string vocabularies had already helped make the Munich label resistant to category. Just over a decade old, ECM had nearly sixty relevant albums from which to choose, so the six sides became an exercise in severe abundance. Each selection is both evidence and omission, a small aperture onto an expanding country.

Jean-Marc Bailleux’s liner notes attempt to chart that country through a triangle marked JAZZ, ROCK, and CLASSICAL. The thought experiment is useful if only because the music keeps escaping it. Terje Rypdal and Egberto Gismonti occupy the center through their commitment to composition and orchestration; John Abercrombie, Pat Metheny, Bill Connors, Mick Goodrick, and Ralph Towner pull the figure toward different borders. Yet the anthology’s deeper subject is the failure of borders themselves. The guitar becomes a cartographic instrument that redraws the ground as soon as it touches it.

Towner’s music supplies several of the set’s most spacious coordinates. On Solstice (ECM 1060), “Oceanus” sends his twelve-string guitar opening in every direction while Jan Garbarek’s tenor rises through Eberhard Weber’s bass and cello, all held in lucid suspension by Jon Christensen’s drums. Weber stretches melody toward infinity, and Towner answers with chords containing their own vanishing points. The solo “Entry in a diary,” preserved on Diary (ECM 1032), contracts that breadth into private notation. Each decaying string leaves behind a piece of thought that continues after sound has withdrawn.

“Trellis,” housed within Batik (ECM 1121), finds Towner on classical guitar beside Eddie Gomez’s bass and Jack DeJohnette’s drums. Gomez cuts through the ornamental stride with urgent vocalized lines, while DeJohnette turns rhythm into a shifting scaffold. “Piscean Dance,” another Solstice selection, returns Towner to the twelve-string with Christensen, whose drumming casts shadows that sometimes arrive before their source. Closing the anthology, “Beneath An Evening Sky” appears on Old Friends, New Friends (ECM 1153), folding twelve-string and classical guitars around Towner’s piano as David Darling’s cello writes grave crosshatchings through the center. Across these pieces, intimacy and distance occupy the same fretboard.

The collection also turns toward Terje Rypdal’s more volatile topography. His place near the center of Bailleux’s diagram reflects a life divided productively among rock, contemporary composition, and orchestral thought. By 1981 he had written an opera, three symphonies, a double-bass concerto for Barre Phillips, and Whenever I Seem To be Far Away (ECM 1045), whose electric guitar enters orchestral texture without surrendering its voltage.

The title piece of Waves (ECM 1110) places Rypdal’s guitar and synthesizer above Sveinung Hovensjø’s six-string electric bass and Christensen’s drums while Palle Mikkelborg transforms fluegelhorn through a ring modulator. Each line is pulled into temporary gravity. “Sunrise,” selected from Rypdal/Vitous/DeJohnette (ECM 1125), is more abrasive. DeJohnette’s scurrying drums and Miroslav Vitous’s suspended bass tones surround Rypdal as his pick scores holes into the audible surface. Descendre (ECM 1144) contributes “Avskjed,” where organ, guitar, muted trumpet, and drums create three minutes of paradoxical arrival. The title means farewell, yet the piece opens a portal and leaves time slightly bent.

Where Rypdal rends open the surface, John Abercrombie peers through its reflections. He began guitar in adolescence to impress people with Chuck Berry imitations, and Berklee never cauterized that first electrical appetite. Work with Dreams, the Brecker Brothers, Gil Evans, Gato Barbieri, Billy Cobham, and Jack DeJohnette eventually led him into ECM’s orbit, where flamboyance became inward illumination.

“Memoir,” one of the acoustic miniatures on Characters (ECM 1117), divides Abercrombie’s guitars across the stereo field. The two voices approach memory from opposite doors, touching fragments that alter whenever revisited. The album M (ECM 1191) expands that conversation in its title track through Richie Beirach’s piano, George Mraz’s bass, and Peter Donald’s drums. Mraz burnishes the harmonic surface until Abercrombie’s electric twelve-string appears in angled reflections. Returning to Characters, “Evensong” layers acoustic and electric guitars into simultaneous selves.

The title track of Timeless (ECM 1047) places Abercrombie with Jan Hammer on organ and synthesizer and DeJohnette on drums. A drone slowly acquires guitar meditations, then rhythmic mass, until the trio seems to discover space from inside it. Its vastness is the distance one mind requires to hear another forming.

Egberto Gismonti expands that interior space toward a more elusive cultural geometry. His classical formation included fifteen years of piano, studies with Nadia Boulanger, and composition with Jean Barraqué. His pianism remains vividly documented in “Tango” on Dança das Cabeças (ECM 1089) and “Frevo” on Solo (ECM 1136), yet he turned increasingly toward an eight-string guitar reshaped by experimental tunings. Concert tradition, Brazilian vernaculars, film, improvisation, and encounters with Amazonian Indigenous culture pass through his music without becoming mutually exclusive.

Sol Do Meio Dia (ECM 1116) supplies “Raga,” in which Gismonti’s eight-string enters circles traced by Nana Vasconcelos’s percussion and Collin Walcott’s tabla. High harmonics flicker above thumb-piano resonances, while flute and wordless chanting open a pathway into themselves. The same energies condense in “Salvador,” taken from Solo, where rhythmic cells surface and vanish before the intellect can classify them. A song rises through the instrument toward a scale at once civic, celestial, and microscopic.

Pat Metheny occupies another part of the map, though his coordinates appear genetically inherited. The youngest guitarist represented, he began at fourteen, won a DownBeat scholarship that year, entered the University of Miami in 1972, and was soon teaching there. By 1975 he was teaching Berklee’s most advanced guitar students. His work with Gary Burton and Lyle Mays made “fusion” feel less a category than the natural grammar of someone raised amid jazz, rock, jingles, melody, and formal study. The Beatles references threaded through American Garage (ECM 1155) and the collaged architecture of “The Epic” on As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls (ECM 1190) reveal hybridity as a matter of course.

Within New Chautauqua (ECM 1131), “Sueño Con Mexico” turns around an acoustic ostinato while Metheny adds electric bass and gilded ornaments whose grace becomes quietly destabilizing. Pat Metheny Group (ECM 1114) yields “Phase Dance,” buoyed by Mark Egan’s seesawing bass and Dan Gottlieb’s close drumming as Metheny and Mays exchange lines that seem germinated rather than assembled. “The Bat,” heard on 80/81 (ECM 1180/81), places Metheny with Charlie Haden, DeJohnette, Dewey Redman, and Mike Brecker. Its minor-key contour carries a shadow of “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” even as its nostalgia opens into a corridor lined with lives that never occurred.

Bill Connors followed a path both parallel and opposite to Metheny’s. Largely self-taught, he moved through electric blues, Los Angeles studio work, and Return to Forever before withdrawing toward Julian Bream, Andrés Segovia, and the acoustic guitar. The strangely titled “The To The Gaurdian,” heard on Theme To The Gaurdian (ECM 1057), builds from gnarled motifs that reveal identity one turn at a time. Of Mist And Melting (ECM 1120) provides “Melting,” joining his acoustic guitar to Garbarek’s tenor, Gary Peacock’s bass, and DeJohnette’s drums. Connors’s arpeggios flower into a language Garbarek translates across immense distances, while the gentle solo gives shadow a contour without asking it to confess.

The anthology’s final guitarist, Mick Goodrick, is also its figure of disciplined disappearance. Despite years with Gary Burton and a reputation as one of Boston’s most sought-after teachers, he remained publicly elusive. “Feebles, Fables And Ferns,” taken from In Pas(s)ing (ECM 1139), explains why such discretion should never be mistaken for absence. Goodrick’s guitar moves among John Surman’s baritone saxophone, Gomez’s bass, and DeJohnette’s drums with pensive warmth. The bass seems to grow from the guitar’s lower body, Surman’s sound acquires verbal suppleness, and Goodrick binds the ensemble with filaments too fine to announce themselves.

Of all ECM-themed compilations, Guitar Music from ECM may be the most persuasive because its sequencing is rife with discovery. The box does not summarize the label’s guitarists; it exposes the instrument as a machine for revising the border between place and abstraction.

A map ordinarily promises return. Follow its marks and the road should become recoverable. This anthology quietly withdraws that promise. Its coordinates remain precise, but the borders change each time attention crosses them. Perhaps listening is not a journey through sound. Perhaps sound travels through us, using the nervous system as temporary terrain before continuing into forms of matter that have no ears. Under that possibility, these records become future fossils buried inside the present, waiting for an intelligence not yet born to mistake our longing for evidence of a vanished species.