GISKE’s "The Sound of Birdsong" doesn’t so much begin as it seeps into the room, like the pale, perpetual twilight of a Norwegian summer night where sleep feels like a theoretical concept. This is a song for the space between the last page of a book and turning off the light; a four-minute float in that strange, conscious stillness when the world is quiet...

Listening to Nom De Plume’s new album, Circle the Dream, is like finding an old, intricate map for a place that doesn't exist on any globe. This is a record for the motionless traveler, the soul pacing the perimeter of its own skull. Aris Karabelas and Michael Magee have crafted a landscape not of highways and canyons, but of the vast, contradictory terrain behind...