Percussionist Ryan Scott, a longtime fixture on the Toronto contemporary music scene, commissioned a slew of fellow Canadians to write pieces for him that placed the snare drum at their center. The 14 resulting pieces collected on this double CD respond to his prompt in a dizzying variety of ways—whether drawing in electronics, spoken word samples, or extended techniques, reflecting modern percussion aesthetics or dipping into style-colliding excursions. The visceral Bekah Simms piece Skinscape IV revolves around friction to underline the connection between the musician and an electronically-mediated iteration of their instrument. Scott generates a kaleidoscopic array of sounds produced by scratching a saxophone reed across the surface of snare amid the din of electronically-processed, snare-derived gestures. Brian Current’s Infantry draws out the snare’s role in military culture, transcribing into snare parts the vocal patterns in performed texts that were drawn from historical letters of soldiers, a la Peter Ablinger’s Voice and Piano. On the other hand, Michael Oesterle’s Hush opts for limited means, an all-acoustic dynamo of intricate, shape-shifting pattern variations using only drumsticks on the snare surface and the rims, a raucous reduction that’s among the most transportive works on the album. It’s a lot to take in at once, but the variety and range of the collection—which also includes strong work from Jason Doell, Christina Volpini, and Kati Agócs, among others — is impressive considering the humble core of the music.