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.