The career of the Gran Canaria-born musician Pablo Díaz-Reixa seems to work in an accelerated time-frame, speeding through decades and eras as he develops his sound. Though he has always worked with digital technology, his early work sounded archaic, its massed carnival percussion and traditional melodies roaming around the Afro-Latin diaspora.

Canadian singer-songwriter Basia Bulat’s first three albums were recognisably folky. Her main instrument was the autoharp. Good Advice is different. With its more upfront songwriting and verve, her fourth album is a giant leap. It is also Bulat’s best to date.

A Coliseum Complex Museum is defined by its density. The Montréal band’s fifth album begins with a flurry of percussion which gives way to treated guitar and frontman Jace Lasek’s almost-falsetto vocal. Opening cut “The Bray Road Beast” is initially ethereal, with the space between each musical contribution suggesting a tantalisingly unfinished picture. By the time it finishes, after five minutes, layer upon layer of guitar, Mellotron, double-tracked vocals and more have been added. The result is a steamrolling assault on the ears.

It seems incongruous that this fine country-rockin’ band should come all the way from Canada to play a half-empty room above a pub on a chilly, January midweek night on the British south coast. That they do so with such gusto and aplomb is hugely impressive. By the end, they’ve filled the place with a whooping hoedown and made it feel like a honkytonk bar somewhere off a lost highway in a mythic America, yet with the wry, modern, liberal-minded twist of Corb Lund’s lyrics.

Any Christmas album worth its salt draws from the classics. Versions of, say, “We Three Kings”, “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”, “Silent Night”, “Let it Snow! Let it Snow! Let it Snow!” and “The Little Drummer boy” are compulsory. What is not so inevitable is how these musical and seasonal chestnuts are tackled. All five songs are covered on Lit Up: Music for Christmas, and all five sound like they never have before.

Names can be deceiving: take Emilie & Ogden. Once you know that the name is not that of a traditional duo, but rather describes Canadian musician Emilie Kahn and her Ogden harp, it’s hard to escape the thought that the music will be syrupy-sweet, twee and incredibly precious. But while it’s true that Kahn’s instrumental palette lends itself to a certain delicacy, underneath is a steely gaze and core of fire.

Incoming director Fergus Linehan has assembled some of the most respected names in their fields for his first Edinburgh International Festival. For classical music, that means Anne-Sophie Mutter, Valery Gergiev and Michael Tilson Thomas (among many others); for dance it means Sylvie Guillem; and for theatre it means Simon McBurney’s Complicite and Robert Lepage.

I walked out of Videodrome into Soho’s neon in 1983, and felt the film’s hallucinatory visions had infected the street. It’s one of a handful of times a film has shifted my mind. David Cronenberg’s crowning achievement before, as critic Kim Newman notes in a documentary extra, he diluted his work by adapting others’, it retains a cohesive, grubby surreality.

Canadian heroic tenor Jon Vickers, who died on Friday 10 July aged 88 and whose full life took him from work on a Saskatchewan farm to the great opera houses of the world, was inimitable, terrifying and titanic. Faced with the intense flavour of what follows, I can only write a sober short introduction to the magical words of our two contributors. 

Violinists either fathom the elusive heart and soul of Elgar’s music or miss the mark completely. Canadian James Ehnes, one of the most cultured soloists on the scene today, is the only one I’ve heard since Nigel Kennedy to make the Violin Concerto work in concert, in an equally rare total partnership with Elgarian supreme Andrew Davis and the Philharmonia. Last night he found the same emotional core in the Violin Sonata at the end of a colossal programme with a no less extraordinary but much less widely known companion, the American pianist Andrew Armstrong.