BILL FRISELL HAS a lot of nerve calling his new Nonesuch CD The Willies. Since the revered guitarist entered his overtly country- and bluegrass-tinged Americana phase, with such albums as Nashville, Ghost Town, and Good Dog, Happy Man, his music, rife with weepy bends and bell-like echoes, has not been likely to give a listener the heebie-jeebies.

One is tempted to call Frisell's music sublime. But in Verses from the Center, a translation of and commentary on the second-century Indian philosopher Nagarjuna, British Buddhist scholar Stephen Batchelor teases out an understanding of the sublime that should cause us to reconsider the way we use that term. Elaborating on a reference to the sublime sound of the "thunders and howling of breaking ice" by the often drug-addled English romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Batchelor writes: "In contrast to the sensations of pleasure and delight induced by contemplating something beautiful, an experience of the sublime evokes exhilarated feelings of terror and fascination. These opposing forces of fear and attraction cancel each other out, leaving one suspended in a poised rapture."

I can relate. As a young child I had a recurring nightmare in which my entire field of vision was filled by a pristine white plane, flawless and welcoming like a freshly ironed, warm cotton sheet. Abruptly it would change to prickly gray static, like the noisy "snow" on a TV screen receiving no broadcast signal. I would be filled with dread until the unblemished image of abstract perfection returned and calmed my jangled nerves. Still, I always knew the image would flip again. That gave me the willies. I would wake up panting and stay awake for I don't know how long, contemplating death and trying to imagine what the inevitable nothingness was going to feel like.

Just recalling the experience brings up a surge of that exquisite and unsettling tension between tranquillity and terror. I frequently get that feeling from the guitar music of Nels Cline and Tisziji Munoz. And I used to access it fairly often while listening to Frisell, as well. You can hear why on :rarum V, the Frisell volume in ECM's newly unveiled series of artist-picked compilations from the label's vaults. On such pieces as "Resistor," "Tone," and "Alien Prints," from the 1980s albums Rambler and Lookout for Hope, a sinister darkness shadows – sometimes defines the core of – his solos. Reacquainting myself with the 14 :rarum V tracks he cut with Paul Motian, Jan Garbarek, Kenny Wheeler, Hank Roberts, Gavin Bryars, and others, I'm reminded why I continue to seek the sublime in each new Frisell recording, knowing full well that, as I recently heard someone say, expectations are little more than premeditated resentments and disappointments.

Positing a Buddhist notion of the sublime, Batchelor argues that its origin lies "not in the awesome power of the natural world, but in the tragic excess of human life." It's hard to find tragedy and excess in the 16 tracks – evenly divided between Frisell originals and old country and folk tunes – that make up The Willies. That's surprising given the love-and-death themes behind such titles as "Cold, Cold Heart," "Single Girl, Married Girl," "John Hardy Was a Desperate Little Man," and "Goodnight Irene," Frisell's ample use of loops and effects, and the fact that his collaborators here are banjo picker-guitarist-pump organist-harmonica player Danny Barnes, of Bad Livers fame, and bassist Keith Lowe, whose credits include Fiona Apple, David Sylvian, Zony Mash, and Barnes's Thee Old Codgers.