Penelope Trappes

Penelope Trappes

Gothic songstress offers snapshots into her soul via experimental soundscapes

Penelope Trappes doesn’t treat her music like a maths equation; nothing she does is calculated. Each song is written, performed and recorded in a moment, letting her emotions escape through her beautifully harrowing music with little regard for what the rule book says. And it’s exceptional for it.
“Making music is like a meditation,” she says. “It’s having these places that you know you can find your solace and express whatever’s coming through you.”
Australian-born and Brighton-based, what exudes from her is dark, hypnotic, and minimalist; it’s weeping in slow motion and the soundscaping of whatever she needs to get off her chest. Often, there’s a focus to her work. 2023’s //Heavenly Spheres// saw her creating with only her voice, an upright piano and an old reel-to-reel tape deck; //Hommelen// centres on the halldorophone, a perculiar, digitized offshoot of the cello. Her fifth album, //My Requiem// was penned as it was recorded, in a house in rural Glasgow, alone with her thoughts. As ever, she arrived there with nothing pre-written.
“I kept picking up the cello first, because I wanted a drone,” she reminisces. From there, she’d find loops within her improvising, admitting: “I’m not a prolific instrumentalist at all, I just pick up sounds. I studied piano when I was younger, and I hated being told how to play and what to read, so it’s a very punk reaction to that. If you gave me a trumpet, I’d probably just bang on it; it’s how I think a performance artist would treat it.”
Despite her purposeful naivety of instruments, her training as an opera singer “taught me about my body. It gave me the capacity to manipulate my voice in different ways.” With those skills at her disposal, inspiration soaks into her from her environment and the “blues of life”.
“I can see and feel the dark, and I acknowledge it,” Trappes continues. “I’m really into astrology and other metaphysical ways of learning and one thing I can’t get away from is familial chaos. It’s become a way of learning about myself and how to navigate hurdles.”
The record is panged by discomfort. //Red Dove//, inspired by a dream that “ended with the vivid image of a boy holding a red dove,” – muses on “violent hope and humanity’s “acceptance of toxic social norms,” while //Platinum// and //Sleep// discuss the claustrophobia of families. It’s plantitive, but silver linings do occasionally illuminate the gloom too. Her long-standing relationship with filmmaker Agnes Haus, meanwhile, ensures “visual storytelling,” elevates the songs to much darker, captivating plains.
Now she’s busy re-creating her abstract soundscapes for the stage. A full UK and EU tour is set for April, with “supplementary releases” catching //My Requiem//’s shadow and expanding on its narrative later in the year.
When asked what to expect from her live shows, she chuckles: “I’m on the precipice of answering that! It’s going to be more dramatic than on the album; you’ll still have your meditative moments, but there’s going to be brimstone and fire too.”

PROG FILE
LINE-UP: Penelope Trappes (vocals, cello, guitars, synths)
SOUNDS LIKE: Chelsea Wolfe trapped within a nightmare directed by David Lynch co-starting a melancholy Kate Bush
CURRENT RELEASE: //My Requiem// releases 4th April via Oli Records
WEBSITE: https://penelopetrappes.bandcamp.com/

— Phil Weller