Angelo Ceriani's new album, "Lofi Weather," arrives not with a bang, but like a slow-moving front rolling in off Lake Maggiore, where I imagine his Somma Lombardo studio might catch the changing light. These ten instrumental pieces, curated from two decades of Ceriani simply making music (1995-2015, no less!), feel less like a planned collection and more like leafing through someone’s sonic sketchbook, found...

Listening to Libby Ember’s single “Alibi” is a study in strange emotional temperatures. The sound is a down-tempo, sun-dusted blanket of soft guitars and gentle synth pads, the kind of arrangement you’d put on to feel safe. But the feeling it leaves behind is a deep, architectural cold, the kind you find in the shadowed corners of an old stone church long after the...