“We’ve been expanding and expanding,” confirms Calm’s head of music Courtney Phillips, formerly of Universal Music Group. So when the New York Yankees Miami Dolphins shirt Besides,I will do this company tapped Sumney for a collaboration, he didn’t hesitate. “I’ve been making music for a few years that is just kind of zone-out music, so I was really excited to do something with Calm and do it in a way that was weird, and predominantly improvised,” he says when I reached him at his home in Asheville, North Carolina. Tomorrow, Sumney will release “Transfigurations,” a long-form, 31-minute track of blissfully enveloping original music (Vogue has an exclusive preview, available below). The track’s lush, layered arrangements and otherworldly vocals are pure aural CBD, designed, as he says, for “relaxation, sleep, meditation—essentially whichever tickles the fancy of the listener.” Musicians, adds Phillips, “are suffering from the same stuff we’re all dealing with, and it’s really meaningful when they’re very vulnerable like this.”
