Wisconsin-based duo, Bell Monks, featuring Eric Sheffield and Jeff Herriott, have shared a new video for Keep The Sunlight Out, from their album “Watching the Snow Fall”, which was released late last year by Wayside & Woodland (purchase links below).
W&W framed their creations as slow, dreamy, haunting music, telling us Eric and Jeff call their music “sleepy rock,” blending lush sonic textures with slower, mostly traditional song structures.
While they both have academic backgrounds in experimental electronic composition, which impact how they conceive of and develop musical material, they cherish the creative aspects of the recording process, often finding songs in the studio. Recording and mixing become tools to conjure aural magic, almost like sleight of hand, through the misdirection of multi-tracking, layering, and the subtle use of processing techniques they’ve developed in their academic careers.
Inspiration regularly comes from their natural environment – the birds, the sun, the trees, and the landscape. Jeff routinely walks in the parks near his home in rural Wisconsin, spaces that have served as lyrical inspiration for much of their recent music, both in the specific description of visual environments and the philosophical sensations that these spaces conjure. In some small way, their music invites people to slow down and take a break from the technological onslaught, perhaps so they might notice more of these spaces themselves or enjoy the sound of some cool synthesizers.
Watch the accompanying video to their album track, Keep The Sunlight Out. The song and video go light on touch, the use of timelapse to capture the changing shadows across a room, the winter freeze on a window, pets sleeping and Jeff’s unrushed lyrics conjuring a remarkable stillness as he beckons to ‘put the clock away, pull the blankets up’. This calm stillness makes moments like Matt Onstad’s trumpet solo and Trevor Saint’s crotales percussion all the more beautiful and serene. It’s a song to lose yourself in.
Jeff Herriott tells us:
The song started with the keys part, which is this long series of floating chords. I landed on the “keep the sunlight out” vocal melody pretty quickly, and we built the track around that phrase. Wanting to sleep in is a pretty relatable sentiment, especially when that alarm hits mid-dream. In reality, I don’t want to keep the sunlight out of much of anything, and the relative sunniness is one of my favorite things about living in Wisconsin. I also love the cold – our album is a love letter to winter – and even though the video implies that the tropics are a summery dream, I’m thinking more about the warmth of a great blanket. Almost nothing is better than a good night’s sleep.
The video was mostly shot at or near my home in Wisconsin over several months, though I captured the beach stuff while visiting friends as part of separate trips to Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and Miami Beach, Florida. Eric and I were also delighted to include shots with both of our sun-seeking pets (my cat and his dog). As someone who likes to sleep in, I have to give myself credit for staging multiple dawn shoots as part of this project.
Watching the Snow Fall is out now.
Order via Bandcamp (Digital/CD)
