For years, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma has made music in which little seems to happen, at least through conscious effort. Gift Songs is Cantu-Ledesma’s first major release under his own name since Tracing Back the Radiance, and it feels like an extension of the 2019 album. They went into the studio with little idea of what was to come out, Cantu-Ledesma has said, which makes the cohesiveness of Gift Songs that much more remarkable. Each of the album’s three major parts—the side-long opener “The Milky Sea,” the three-part “Gift Song” suite, and the 10-minute drone piece that blossoms out of the latter—feels fully considered, both as a standalone and a part of the whole. In this way, Gift Songs might be an exercise in perspective: one idea, or object, viewed from three different angles.