This year, the annual Vancouver Improvised Music Meeting expands to two venues and six concerts, with a bevy of imported guests turning up to explore sound with Vancouver’s finest experimentalists. The shows run from Friday to Sunday (March 27 to 29), starting at 8 p.m. at the Western Front and then moving to the China Cloud for late-night sessions from 11 p.m. on.

If you’ve got the stamina, checking out all six will yield a comprehensive picture of what’s going on in town—and elsewhere, with the visitors including Berlin-based pianist Achim Kaufman and Montreal guitarist René Lussier.

But if we had to pick just two, we’d opt to make a marathon out of Sunday, with Lussier leading an all-star band at the Front before some of the same musicians head to Chinatown to support guitarist Aram Bajakian and his vocalist wife, Julia Ulehla, in their Dálava project, devoted to creative interpretations of folk music from Eastern Europe.