Linda Catlin Smith (b1957) operates out of bustling urban Toronto, although her work puts you in mind of remote no-man’s-lands, places where music would normally fear to tread. This two-CD album of selected chamber and instrumental compositions opens with Cantilena, a 2013 duo for viola (Emma Richards) and vibraphone (Simon Limbrick) that acts as a telling entry point into Smith’s instantly alluring although cryptic sound world. Personally, the plugged-in, motorised whir of the vibraphone feels instinctively urban; I’m hearing Steve Reich and the Modern Jazz Quartet’s Milt Jackson. But Smith lets gut(sy) strings and metal bars that clink like ice in a fizzy drink coexist in a magical way, the poker-faced vibraphone tiptoeing around the viola’s guttural double-stopped intervals – she notes that the range of both instruments is almost identical.

Structurally, echoes of a verse-and-chorus form emerge, although points of demarcation feel endlessly flexible – qualities shared by her 2014 Piano Quintet and the conspicuously bold Drifter for piano (Philip Thomas) and guitar (Diego Castro Magas) from 2009. A paradox grows curiouser and curiouser in the Quintet, with melodic fragments becoming increasingly tangled as the underlying harmony remains unflappably translucent; a comparable process in Drifter ends up with the guitarist moving from definitive pitch towards percussive slides and knocks. Anton Lukoszevieze and Mira Benjamin play unaccompanied string pieces while the Montreal-based Bozzini Quartet offer two string quartets – including the JMW Turner-inspired Folkestone (1999) which, referencing the master’s sketchbooks, offers 24 subtlety shaded, then re shaded and re reshaded, perspectives on the same pool of material.