Composers Christian Calon and Chantal Dumas share interests in electroacoustic music using field recordings at its basis. But here, they also share a 2-month trip across Canada, from Montréal to Vancouver, by way of the Great White North (they reached the Arctic Circle in Yukon) and a return home through the Badlands. Radio Roadmovies is a 2-CD set presenting two hour-long works conceived for the radio (Radio-Canada and DeutschlandRadio Berlin). Le Petit homme dans l’oreille (The Little Man in the Ear) (2000), (Phonurgia Nova Award in 2001) is a fragmented travel diary, filled with people, places and events. The two composers, often addressing the microphone to describe and comment, are joined by a cast of fellow travellers and locals, from children shouting their names at Ouimet Canyon to Native American chiefs greeting them with a song. The work takes the form of a series of snapshots segued through complementing or contrasting sonic elements, instead of following a chronological or geographical logic. The composers’ touch is mostly limited to choosing and editing the recordings, although some sections are heavily — and obviously — treated, like the stampede caller’s heated description of the race turned into a sampled rap. The human factor is through the roof in this bilingual account. Either you will like the various characters or you will be annoyed by their chatter. The second disc is a completely different affair. Culled from the same field recordings, Documents de surface (Surface Documents) (2002) excludes human voices to focus solely on environmental sounds. The work is a gripping display of nature (wind, water) and man (trains, boats) at work. Here, the composers work seamless dissolves between locations to put together theme-related pieces. Côté Pacifique, with its foghorns, trains and crashing waves, is the most striking. Urban listeners will be astounded by the richness of these nature recordings and the elegance of their organization. Rural listeners (like this reviewer) should listen with all windows open, and let real and recorded sounds intermingle, just so you can’t say where that train is coming from.

The idea of a Canadian road movie may conjure up perversely disturbing images of defensive driving, speed limits rigidly observed and perfectly nice people encountered along the way. For the most part, that’s what Calon and Dumas deliver in these two pieces realised for Radio Canada’s L’Espace du son and Deutschland Radio in Berlin.

Made for the former, Le petit homme dans l’oreille presents its found materials with a minimum of manipulation. Wind, birds, snatches of conversation, background ambience from a threshermen’s reunion and stampede in Manitoba contribuate to a gently bucolic cross-country journey. At times the spirit of R Murray Schafer’s prolific music is invoqued but without his ambitious grandiloquence. The key emphasis here is on the human trace in the lanscape. An awesome landscape acoustic, stirred with breaths of air and occasional bird twitters, is suddenly transformed by the Doppler wail of a freight train, human voices are caught either in the boxy acoustic of a camper van or in the delicious echo of the Ouimet Canyon.

And so it goes, gentle and strangely uninvolving, like a long distance journey when fatigue and a drift of attention eases the miles by in affectless boredom. On Documents de surface, the human archaeology is minimal, replaced by animal and weather sounds. Canadian Pacific still puts in an appearance, but the action is more operatic with long naturalistic recitatives intersperced with choric effetcs from trees and watercourses and odd dramatic aria provided by birds.

As a radio experience, these are doutless compelling pieces. They’re more troublesome on CD. They could have done with some visual enhancement, possibly a CD-ROM of location photography or a virtual map of relevant routes.