I recently came across the music of Joshua Abrams, whose work reminds me a lot of some earlier Chicago post-rock. Here’s Magnetoception, a 2015 album that features the guimbri, “the three-stringed north african bass lute,” as well as Tortoise’s Jeff Parker.
In nidus-related news, pigeons use magnetoception for navigation. Pliny (10.71), however, mentions the swallow rather than the pigeon as an example of a bird used for sending long-distance messages.