On April 4th, Brighton-based Australian vocalist, producer, and multi-instrumentalist Penelope Trappes will release her fifth full-length album ‘A Requiem’. It comes alongside news of her signing to London imprint, One Little Independent Records. ‘A Requiem’ collects ten haunting, ambient soundscapes – incantations of dreams and nightmares, of death and grief, as well as power and autonomy. Carnal, transcendent cello drones are used to exorcise historical and generational traumas in an evocative and macabre piece of gothic experimentalism.
The announcement comes alongside her exceptional video for new single ‘Sleep’ directed by Agnes Haus, which features acting talent Maxine Peake and Kate Dickie. Penelope says “As ‘Sleep’ is about a dream my father had and had echoes of Henry Fuseli’s ‘The Nightmare’, I decided to bring that painting to life – me as the ‘sleep hag’, but I needed an actor to be the ‘sleeping victim’. As a massive fan of Maxine Peake’s work, I reached out to her about working together on it. In a totally independent occurrence, I was introduced to Kate Dickie – who I am also a big fan of – and she was nearby and happy to get involved. It was an absolutely perfect cast! Three witches! We all chatted about politics in the kitchen and filmed an unscripted pseudo-horror film about sleep paralysis in a bedroom – and it all worked out beautifully!”
‘A Requiem’ is a musical service in honour of the dead, a sanctuary Trappes built for herself to explore familial chaos and history. “I was looking for an equilibrium between a ‘heaven’ and a ‘hell’” she explains, “screaming out to the wisdom of our foremothers – surfacing and leading me into true strength and beauty. I listened to the sorrow closely. Death is a part of our reality. Inevitable. Omnipresent. But nightmares can be beautiful”.
Single ‘Sleep’ is a resonant, baroque epic of chilling potency, each deep strum and tactile bass note further hammering home the conceptual knocking of death’s door. “It’s infinitely hard to even sing these words as it’s such a conflicting thing to think about – an oddly indifferent longing for your parents’ life to come to a close, for them to peacefully escape their pain and be released. Musically the sound was heavier and more gut-wrenching than I have ever sounded before. It was a drastic and extreme purge of emotion”.
Seeking solitude for what she knew would be an intense and cathartic writing experience, Trappes travelled to Scotland and isolated completely. Amidst meditative and psychedelic states, she channeled demons and accessed parts of herself she’d long desired to cleanse. During candle-lit recording sessions she found herself drawn to cello, an instrument she has no formal training in, she explains, “I always felt an affinity toward the cello, I embraced it, held it, and became one with it as a way to accompany my voice. The nerve-like strings of the cello became external chords of my vocal folds… I scratched on them, leaned into them, and conjured all of the textures I could muster”.
‘A Requiem’ is a raw, spiritual journey. Astonishingly vulnerable, and a compelling examination of loss – the threat of it, the meaning of it, the coming to terms with it. Across an album of breathtaking compositions, we are asked to bear witness to a sacred personal experience like no other.
Despite formal vocal training in opera and jazz when she was younger, it wasn’t until after her daughter was born that Penelope began writing her own music. She says coming into music later has been eye opening, and she laments the fact that women past 30 are too often discarded by the music industry; “Creativity doesn’t go away when you get older, it flourishes, changes, grows like all of life,” she says, “it amazes me that this is still something for society to wrap their heads around.”
Penelope released her acclaimed trilogy, ‘Penelope One’, ‘Two’ and ‘Three’, on Fabric’s Houndstooth label. In between instalments of her ambitious trilogy, Penelope released a clutch of both experimental and more dreampop-oriented EPs. She demonstrated her versatility in the extended 25-minute deep-listening composition ‘Gnostic State’, and the arpeggiated electronics and minimalist songwriting on the ‘Eel Drip’ EP, which was accompanied by image and film inspired by Francesca Woodman’s 1970s series of nude self-portraits with eels. She also released an album of reworks, ‘Penelope Redeux’, with contributions by Cosey Fanni Tutti, Mogwai, and Nik Colk Void, and the cassette, ‘Mother’s Blood,’ a vocal-free meditative reinterpretation of ‘Penelope Three’ concluding with the live-scoring of a 1-hour film at Sonica Festival.
Penelope’s fourth album, ‘Heavenly Spheres’, was released in 2023 on her own Nite Hive imprint, was composed using just piano, voice and an old reel-to-reel tape deck during a two-week artist residency for Britten Pears Arts at the house where the composer, teacher and musicologist Imogen Holst lived in Aldeburgh, Suffolk. Most recently, 2024’s ‘Hommelen’, the austere and beautifully severe result of her Halldorophone residency at EMS Stockholm was released on Paralaxe Editions.
In the live realm, Penelope’s music expands into tidal waves and surges of tension with hypnotising gothic live visuals by Agnes Haus. Select shows are accompanied by a live band, and other times performing solo, she has shared the stage with the likes of William Basinski, Mary Lattimore, and NYX drone choir, and she has extensively toured the UK, Australia, and Europe over the last five years, including a pivotal live performance with the London Contemporary Orchestra at Southbank Centre.
