released June 20, 2025

C°S012 Recorded and Performed by Sleep Number in 2025 Mastered by Austin Gordon at Commonwealth Mastering Photography by Sophie Hull and Tim Gormley Graphic Design by Kassandra Villanueva Album description by Matthew Phillips

Description: What blooms in the clouds above a green hillside that fills the observer with peace, or compassion, or awe? What moves through the oak, gnarled in its particular way, that induces the sense of presence and clarity that we feel when we happen upon it in a misty forest? And these dripping ferns, what are they doing so that the mere visual apprehension of them overwhelms the particularities that race across our awareness and opens us up to thusness? It’s clear that it’s not just any space, it’s not just any environment that cracks our shell; it’s that one, that one does that particular thing that pries apart our mental closures and brings us into the fullness of being. Something unique about that particular water feature, that particular mountaintop, that particular glint of light pulls our consciousness into awareness of the immediacy of existence.

We like music that does this too. What Sleep Number’s Sunspill does is open up noetic spaces, psychic environments that both contain conscious experience and nurture its expansion. From the opening drone of the title track, the sense of transportation is already dawning. As Sophie Hull’s diaphonous voice permeates the air, a new atmosphere grows within the newly pathbroken clarity. We arrive at a vista, where a sun-scorched guitar lances through and sets the vision alight. It sets a tone for what’s to come,showing the range of Hull’s sonic palette and her organic, stratified compositions that grow back and forth from emptiness to fullness.

Ghostly echoes of Hull’s voice emanate throughout Sunspill, weaving in and out of the textured drones, guitar architecture, and flutters of synthesis, everything merging into a unified sonic space. Gauzed in layers of delay and reverb, her voice loops back on itself, spinning out emergent melodies. This dense processing transforms her human vocals into impossible forms: boundless sustain, choruses of a single voice, rounds and canons, loops closing and opening and layering across near and far timescales. As the vocals clip against the edge of the infinite, they compress into voiceless sonic abstractions, enveloping the listener in their immensity. It’s not that it’s low-fidelity: it’s that the lyrics are dissipating into the limitless sky.

Sunspill feels both contained and infinite. Each track unfolds its own world, but each of those worlds reflects in each other track’s facets. Sometimes they open up, and sometimes they expand into the void. “Nothingness, Glistening” contains spaces that achieve both effects. Hull’s vocals invoke an aperture into existence against an organesque chord, while the intensity builds until an all-embracing, crushing distortion fills the expanse. It’s somehow both contemplative and astonishingly massive, both palpably human and sublime.

While the texture of the vocal unites all of Sunspill in its hazy glow, dynamic shifts flow in and out across its runtime, revealing new possibilities for spaciousness, new voids, new vistas. But maybe all these spatial metaphors ultimately just point at time: Sunspill creates these psychic fields because it seems to suspend time, stretching it until it snaps into eternity. Each piece develops at its own pace, but they all unite in creating the same sense of boundlessness. There’s something of the summer twilight in it, the light that never seems to fade. That’s the thing about time, and the attention we give to it: It goes endless, if you let it.