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 new single and video are out now: the title track, “A Requiem“.

Penelope says: “A Requiem was written for my ailing parents, whom I’ve now said my goodbyes to. Since back in the UK, alone, it’s taken on another meaning as a connection with the earth under my feet here in the land that is my ancestral home. For the visual, Agnes Haus filmed me in the dead of night on a frozen field in a desolate part of East Sussex to capture the extreme cold and to honour the lonely darkness around two holy oak trees, one living, and one long dead.”

Penelope Trappes live dates

• 17.04 – Stoke Newington Old Church, London, UK
• 19.04 – Kapel Begijnhof, Diksmuide, BE
• 20.04 – Roadburn Festival, Tilburg, NL
• 25.04 – Sacred Trinity Church, Manchester, UK
• 26.04 – The Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh, UK
• 02.05 – Alphabet, Brighton, UK

About Penelope Trappes

Penelope Trappes is a UK-based Australian experimental vocalist, musician, and soundscaper renowned for her minimalist and ethereal compositions. She initially gained recognition as part of the electronic duo The Golden Filter.

In 2017, she embarked on a solo career with the release of “Penelope One” via Optimo Music, followed by “Penelope Two” in 2018 and “Penelope Three” in 2021, both on the Houndstooth label.

In between she also released several both experimental and more dreampop-oriented EPs, and released an album of reworks, “Penelope Redeux”, with contributions by Cosey Fanni Tutti, Mogwai, and Nik Colk Void. The cassette, “Mother’s Blood”, was a vocal-free meditative reinterpretation of “Penelope Three”.

In 2023, Trappes launched her own cassette imprint, Nite Hive, debuting with the album “Heavenly Spheres”, composed using just piano, voice, and an old reel-to-reel tape deck during a two-week artist residency.

Penelope’s fourth album, “Heavenly Spheres”, was released in 2023 on her own Nite Hive imprint. Most recently, 2024’s “Hommelen” was released on Paralaxe Editions.

Bernard - Side-Line Staff

Chief editor of Side-Line – which basically means I spend my days wading through a relentless flood of press releases from labels, artists, DJs, and zealous correspondents. My job? Strip out the promo nonsense, verify what’s actually real, and decide which stories make the cut and which get tossed into the digital void. Outside the news filter bubble, I’m all in for quality sushi and helping raise funds for Ukraine’s ongoing fight against the modern-day axis of evil. Besides music I’m also an SEO and AI content flow specialist and have an interest in everything finance from stocks to crypto. There is music in everything!

side-line.com

Brighton-based Australian vocalist, producer, and multi-instrumentalist Penelope Trappes returns with her fifth full-length album “A Requiem” on April 4th via One Little Independent Records. But before that she releases the single “Red Dove”.

She tells us this about the new single: “I felt like this dream was about humanity becoming numb, stripped of emotion, and completely lost in their pain. Sleepwalking. Swallowing the Bitter Pill. The general acceptance of destructive, violent and toxic social norms. The Red dove being a conduit of the world’s negativity, yet held peacefully in the hands of an innocent child.”

The track’s accompanying video by Agnes Haus is inspired by Werner Herzog’s 1993 documentary, “Bells from the Deep: Faith and Superstition in Russia”. Agnes Haus explains: “Penelope showed me the Herzog documentary, and we had this idea that Penelope would play the cult leader of a sect called Red Dove. We filmed the cult footage in a bizarre old Glasgow lawn bowls club, and then bought an old VCR /TV and filtered video through it, recorded footage to videocassette and re-filmed the TV. It was a longer process than anticipated, but well worth it to really try to send Penelope back through time as an evangelical leader filled with regret over a dark event.”

About Penelope Trappes

Penelope Trappes is a UK-based Australian experimental vocalist, musician, and soundscaper renowned for her minimalist and ethereal compositions. She initially gained recognition as part of the electronic duo The Golden Filter.

In 2017, she embarked on a solo career with the release of “Penelope One” via Optimo Music, followed by “Penelope Two” in 2018 and “Penelope Three” in 2021, both on the Houndstooth label.

In between she also released several both experimental and more dreampop-oriented EPs, and released an album of reworks, “Penelope Redeux”, with contributions by Cosey Fanni Tutti, Mogwai, and Nik Colk Void. The cassette, “Mother’s Blood”, was a vocal-free meditative reinterpretation of “Penelope Three”.

In 2023, Trappes launched her own cassette imprint, Nite Hive, debuting with the album “Heavenly Spheres”, composed using just piano, voice, and an old reel-to-reel tape deck during a two-week artist residency.

Penelope’s fourth album, “Heavenly Spheres”, was released in 2023 on her own Nite Hive imprint. Most recently, 2024’s “Hommelen” was released on Paralaxe Editions.

Penelope Trappes live dates

• 17.04 – Stoke Newington Old Church, London, UK
• 19.04 – 4AD, Diksmuide, BE
• 20.04 – Roadburn Festival, Tilburg, NL
• 25.04 – Sacred Trinity Church, Manchester, UK
• 26.04 – The Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh, UK
• 02.05 – Alphabet, Brighton, UK

Bernard - Side-Line Staff

Chief editor of Side-Line – which basically means I spend my days wading through a relentless flood of press releases from labels, artists, DJs, and zealous correspondents. My job? Strip out the promo nonsense, verify what’s actually real, and decide which stories make the cut and which get tossed into the digital void. Outside the news filter bubble, I’m all in for quality sushi and helping raise funds for Ukraine’s ongoing fight against the modern-day axis of evil. Besides music I’m also an SEO and AI content flow specialist and have an interest in everything finance from stocks to crypto. There is music in everything!

side-line.com

(Interview by Janos Janurik) Ever since I got into online music journalism, I’ve always been interested in the background characters around my favourite musicians’ releases that add something important to the product we, the fans end up with.

With this in mind, over the years I have interviewed personalities such as Anton Corbijn (photographer of Depeche Mode and many other music greats), Gareth Jones and Mark Saunders (producers and mixmasters of Depeche Mode and Erasure amongst others).

About eight years ago I had the honour of helping to promote Vince Clarke’s then newly founded mini-record label (VeryRecords) and his releases. In addition to the artists whose albums have been released there in recent years, I also got in contact with Mat Smith, who, like me, is a freelancer – readers of Electronic Sound and Clash know him well – and works as a publicist for VeryRecords as well as being commissioned by Erasure and Mute for a number of press pieces. He also wrote the sleevenotes in the booklet of the new “Cowboy” Deluxe-Edition.

In addition to his journalistic work, he also has his own project “Mortality Tables”, which has just released a new mini-album on cassette and as a digital download. Last November, at the premiere of Vince Clarke’s solo album in London, I had the pleasure of meeting Mat in person and we had a lively chat about our shared passion for music. Knowing how important this project is to him, I approached him and asked him a few questions about it. 

But then life, or rather death, intervened. I didn’t mean this as a cheap shot, but it was indeed a sad event that forced me to make changes to the interview I had with my friend and colleague almost three weeks ago. Now that the aforementioned label is going on holiday, and before I do the same, I would like to bring this exciting musical venture (“The Engineer”) to your attention – and this interview with the man behind it.

SL: Tell us briefly about how you became interested in music. Have you had any musical training, have you learnt to play any instruments? Do you remember the first record you bought?

I grew up in a house where music seemed to always be playing, either on the radio or on my parent’s stereo. My mother listened to a lot of ABBA. Nothing about that was exceptional, particularly. When I used to go to friends’ houses, they always seemed to have the TV switched on, which felt strange to me. My family chose music, and I’ve surrounded myself with it ever since. 

I tried to play the recorder, which was the instrument that most of us learned as kids. My parents gave me a blue one for Christmas one year. I couldn’t play a single note. I briefly learned the basics of notation at school but very quickly forgot all of it. In early high school music classes I was more interested in recording real-life sounds into the Casio keyboard and using those to make compositions. Not long after that, I started making sample-based electronic music on my Amiga 500.

The first album I owned was Nik Kershaw’s ‘Human Racing’. I was given for my birthday the year it was released, along with a Sanyo portable cassette player. I played that album constantly. I wore out the cassette player after two weeks but I still have the ‘Human Racing’ tape and it still sounds incredible to me. 

SL: When did you discover electronic music? And who was the first electronic artist who introduced you to the world of electronic music?

My father is responsible for switching me on to electronic music. There were three pivotal events, and they all relate to times I was with my father.

The first was one evening when my mother was at her restaurant job, and my father was looking after me. I was playing with Lego in the lounge and Gary Numan was performing ‘Cars’ on TV. That performance completely captivated me.

The next was driving around in my father’s car while he did his second job as a debt collector. A friend at work had recorded two tracks from OMD’s ‘Architecture & Morality’ album onto a cassette for him. The songs were ‘Joan Of Arc’ and ‘Maid Of Orleans’, and we’d listen to them over and over.

The third was Soft Cell’s ‘Non-Stop Erotic Videotape’, which he brought home from work one day. That was pretty mind-blowing for a five-year old, and I can only imagine he didn’t realise what it was. It was definitely not suitable for a kid of my age, but, looking back, I don’t remember the imagery – I only recall the music. 

So I owe my father a huge debt for how he shaped my music tastes at a very early age. He was also the one who brought home a cassette copy of ‘The Innocents’ by Erasure and gave it to me. He had no idea quite what he started that day. 

SL: When did you start writing journalistic texts for Mute Records and its artists? What was your first article for Mute and about which artist, which release?

I began a blog called Documentary Evidence in 2003, which was focused on my personal Mute Records collection. I’d just write about the releases from a mostly non-musical perspective, explaining how they made me feel. I still write reviews like that today for Electronic Sound. I also got really interested in telling the stories of specific releases or artists, and that led me to interview people who released music through Mute, or were somehow connected to the label. I have a natural curiosity and inquisitiveness, and that seems to mean people like talking to me and opening up. 

From there I started writing for Clash, and then Electronic Sound and some other places. In 2017 I got asked to chair a panel discussion with Anton Corbijn, Daniel Miller, Paul A. Taylor and Steve Claydon (Add N To (X)) at Rough Trade East in London, about the visual identity of Mute. The first written Mute commission I got was to write a press biography for Chris Carter’s ‘Chemistry Lessons Vol. 1’. I couldn’t believe they asked me to do that, and I couldn’t believe I was being paid to write for the label I loved so much. The team at Mute liked what I did and I’ve been given a few more things to do since then, as well as with the team at BMG who look after the Erasure reissue programme, and Erasure themselves. 

SL: Did Vince Clarke’s VeryRecords label and the associated promotion give you any impetus for your own project, which you called “Mortality Tables”?

Indirectly, yes, but perhaps not in the way you might expect.

My task with VeryRecords was to assemble the press releases. It was the first time I’d worked behind the scenes of a release, where I’d often get involved before the album was even mastered, or before the artwork had even been considered. So I’d be talking to the artists – Reed & Caroline, Alka and Brook – at a very early stage, generally when Vince felt that the album was finished enough for me to listen and for me to start engaging the artists.

It took a while for me to realise this, but the process of working with the artists to write a press release became a collaboration – between all of us, and between my words and their music. I wasn’t just a writer but part of the collective effort to put this music out into the world. I did the same with Nick Hook’s Calm + Collect label, working on releases by Gareth Jones, Spiritual Friendship and others.

In 2019, when I began forming Mortality Tables, I envisaged it as a creative community of collaborators. You can definitely draw a line between that and the ideas that began to form as I worked with VeryRecords and its artists. I also took a lot of inspiration from Vince, who didn’t feel that he needed to only focus on the music that people would expect him to release. That sense of freedom, which Daniel Miller also brought to Mute, directly fed into what Mortality Tables has become. I wanted something where I could work with people making sound art as well as people making images. It had to have artistic breadth. 

I wanted Mortality Tables to be like a gallery, with a portfolio of artists in vastly different disciplines. That’s why Neil Coe deigned the first sleeve image to look like the description of an artwork on the wall of a gallery.

SL: The name of the project refers to the work of actuaries who measure the statistical probability of life insurance payouts. You do something like this in your everyday working life, don’t you?

That’s right. I work with insurance companies all around the world, and have done for over twenty years. I find lots of parallels between the worlds of insurance and electronic music, and the kinds of people I engage with in both of my jobs.

The story goes that I was meeting a friend in a café in Bloomsbury in London one morning. He runs a record label, which is another big inspiration for Mortality Tables. He wishes to remain anonymous, but he is actively involved, in the sense that he must approve anything we decide to do. I call him the Creative Consultant.

So I was meeting him and he had an LP of one of his releases to give me. He asked me if I had a bag to put it in, and I reached into rucksack and retrieved a tote bag. It was from the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries and had been given to me by an actuary a few years before. The Creative Consultant saw the bag with its logo and Latin inscription (‘e peritia ratio’ – ‘reason from experience’) and asked what it meant. I replied, “It’s all mortality tables and shit like that.” The name stuck.

We created our first Mortality Tables Product that morning. It’s called FORKTALK and is a conversation between two friends. We do not publish the details of our conversations. Its entry in the Mortality Tables Catalogue is MTP0.

SL: Dave Clarkson, who is mostly active in electronic and experimental music and Wonderful Beasts, a sound art/electronic music duo consisting of the anonymous Xqui and Carl Knott (boycalledcrow, Spacelab) were your first artists, right? How did you get in touch with them?

The release that moved Mortality Tables from something conceptual to something ‘real’ was ‘Two Meditations For Freya’ by Goodparley (whose name has now changed to Please Close Your Eyes). That was in 2022. It signalled what I wanted Mortality Tables to be: I would come up with ideas and hand them to someone to ‘respond’ to.

That concept has stayed consistent through the first two years of Mortality Tables. I’ll come up with an idea and pick someone to get involved. At the last count, there are at least fifty people who are collaborators. And it isn’t just sound projects – Mortality Tables encompasses sound, art, and words. And insurance. 

However, all rules in creativity are there to be broken, and I broke my own rules in 2023 with the release of Dave Clarkson’s ‘Ghosts Of Christmas Past (Music From Vintage Toys)’. I had nothing to do with the concept of that album, so I guess that’s a bit like Mortality Tables acting like a traditional record label, which is a description I never want to use. The same is true of Andrew Brenza and Alka’s ‘pod’ and boycalledcrow’s ‘Kullu’. However, all these releases only existed because of an earlier collaboration, and that’s how I got myself comfortable with releasing these projects. You’ll see a few more of those types of projects from Mortality Tables over the next few years. 

In answer to your question about how I find artist, it’s actually really straightforward. Anyone involved with Mortality Tables is someone whose music I’ve written about. As for how I choose an artist for a particular project, that’s mostly a case of matching a collaborator to an idea that feels aligned to what they would usually do. However, some of the most enjoyable projects are where the artist is working a long way outside of what they might normally do.

SL: After artists like Andrew Spackman, Rupert Lally, Simon Fisher Turner and Veryan, two years ago you released a strange and experimental piece called “On Mortality, Immortality & Charles Ives”. The piece is a spoken word piece in which you read out the Mortality Tables’ manifesto: “In life, our one true certainty is death.” This narration, recorded by Gareth Jones, was then sent to Vince Clarke who recorded a musical response to the text, which forms the soundtrack to the release. How did you come up with this, somewhat absurd, idea?

I had bought a copy of a book by Alex Danchev called ‘100 Artists’ Manifestos – From The Futurists To The Stuckists’ at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in 2021. I read each of the manifestos from groups like the Surrealists, Dadaists and Situationists as if they were short stories, and it became a really profound experience. On the back of ‘Two Meditations For Freya’, people had started to ask me what Mortality Tables was all about, so it seemed completely natural (and not absurd at all) to write a manifesto.

Mostly it was designed to help me understand why I was doing this, and then I decided to explain it to everyone else. That’s when I asked Gareth to record my narration. At the same time I approached Vince and an anonymous sound artist called venoztks to create sound pieces to accompany it.

The listener can judge whether it successfully explains what this is all about, or not. It does explain why the composer and actuary Charles Ives is so critical to the evolution of Mortality Tables. In fact, the second Mortality Tables Product to be made available was a postcard containing an illustration of Ives in front of a mortality table from 1874, the year of Ives’s birth. That piece was a collaboration with Savage Pencil who had illustrated a lot of the Blast First sleeves.

SL: Released on June 16th, the 40-copy limited edition cassette “The Engineer” is a charity project for Alzheimer’s disease featuring Vince Clarke, Penelope Trappes, Chris Illingworth, Barney Ashton-Bullock, Lara Jones, Simon Fisher Turner, Hattie Cooke, Gareth Jones, Veryan and others. The title character is your father, isn’t he? Is that why you chose Father’s Day as the release date? Tell us a bit about this project!

The title character, the engineer, is based on my father. This project dates back ten years, probably longer, a long time before Mortality Tables was an idea.

I wrote a short story that tried to deal with my feelings about my father as he approached retirement. He lived for work, had no hobbies or friends, and I envisaged him struggling to cope with the concept of stopping work. I was angry when I wrote it, but I was also scared for him. It’s fiction, but it’s rooted in his reality. His actual retirement was very different to what happens in the story. He was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2018, and that’s why we’ll donate all profits from ‘The Engineer’ to the Alzheimer’s Society. Sadly he passed away shortly after ‘The Engineer’ was released. 

When I published the story on my blog, an electronic musician called Laica (Dave Fleet) offered to create some music inspired by the story. He composed a beautiful piece but the project never got completed. A few years later, I came up with a different idea, which involved someone narrating the story with a piece of music behind it. That version also never got off the ground at all, but I liked the idea of asking someone to narrate the story. That’s when I asked Barney Ashton-Bullock if he would do it. He has a brilliant speaking voice, and it was perfect for this story.

It was Gareth Jones who suggested the idea of having different artists respond to different sections of narration. He said it was a bit like the Surrealist game ‘Exquisite Corpse’. I think of Gareth as my spiritual guru. He has a way of unlocking ideas, and freeing you from obstacles that are only there because you’ve put them there. ‘The Engineer’ wouldn’t exist in this form if it wasn’t for Gareth. 

From there, it was a case of picking the collaborators and asking them to respond to a specific 30-second section of narration. No one heard the full story, and no one asked to hear the whole thing. The order the artists agreed to say yes determined which section they got. The only rule I gave them was that their sound response needed to last exactly thirty seconds. 

There are two editions of ‘The Engineer’. One is a digital file that combines the narration and sound responses. The other is a cassette that splits the narration and responses apart. That means the only place you can hear Vince Clarke’s sound response without Barney’s narration is on the cassette, which has now sold out. 

SL: Barney Ashton-Bullock (the creator of Andy Bell’s “Torsten” projects), Vince Clarke, as well as Reed Hays, Alka and Gareth Jones will be familiar to most of our readers, but who are the other contributors? 

Again, everyone involved is someone I’ve written about. When I came up with my collaborator list for this, it was important to me to achieve some sort of diversity. So a lot of the artists here are electronic, but you have artists covering everything from pop to sound art. That was deliberate.

I also wanted diversity of textures. That’s why I included Charlotte Keeffe, Chris Illingworth from GoGo Penguin and Luce Mawdsley. When you put all 29 sound responses together as a single piece, it sounds like a right fucking mess. As the responses were coming in over a 30-month period, I realised that the sprawling, messy quality was a lot like my father’s Alzheimer’s – ideas form, are quickly forgotten before they develop, and are then replaced by something else. That wasn’t planned, at all, but now I can see it was a subconscious idea that must have been there from the moment that Gareth suggested involving lots of artists. 

SL: What plans and ideas are currently circulating in your head? Will it be something journalistic or another Mortality Tables release?

I’m always writing, and I’ve got a few big things underway right now, including something for a label I’ve done a few pieces for before.

In terms of Mortality Tables, now that ‘The Engineer’ has been released, all activities will he paused until later in the summer. We’ve released a huge number of Products in just over two years and I need a break. We’ll return later in the summer with Season 03 of LIFEFILES, which is an ongoing project where artists respond to my really basic field recordings.

We’ll also release a single from Please Close Your Eyes, an album from Andrew Spackman and the full version of Andrew Brenza and Alka’s ‘pod’ collaboration. I’ve been working on one of several projects inspired by Charles Ives, ‘Central Park: A Picture-In-Sounds’, which will be issued as a ‘score’ in October, along with some additional performances of the piece. We’ll begin work on another large-scale collaboration called ‘The Impermanence Project’.

Other things will happen. Other things will not.

More information on Mortality Tables releases.

Use code janos for a 10% discount off anything in the Mortality Tables Catalogue. 

I would like to end this article with a personal message from Mat Smith, who asks the readers and the music listeners to support, if they can, the Alzheimer’s Society, which has received the proceeds of the tape release mentioned in the interview. If you feel able to, please donate to alzheimers.org.uk directly.

János Janurik

I began my career in online music journalism in 2001, writing about artists I had followed since the late ’80s and early ’90s, including Depeche Mode, Erasure and The Cure. I later edited the Hungarian Mute microsite for EMI Music Hungary. This led to interviews with Erasure, Nitzer Ebb and Alan Wilder, and some of those collaborations developed into lasting friendships. Since 2014, I have been part of the editorial team of depechemode.de. I also contribute interviews to Reflections of Darkness, Peek-A-Boo Magazine and Kaput Mag. I maintain a close connection to Mute Records artists and have also supported releases on Very Records. I am proud to collaborate with Side-Line Magazine, where I regularly publish interviews and features.

(Photo by Agnes Haus) Available now is the new Penelope Trappes video for “Harmonic No. 1”, the opening track from her forthcoming tape release “Hommelen” out via Paralaxe Editions on the 7th of June. The video for “Harmonic No. 1” was filmed by Agnes Haus at EMS, Stockholm.

Recorded in December 2023, the release was born out of a residency at Stockholm’s famed EMS, where Trappes spent her sunless days engaging in a sort of conversation with a halldorophone. The rare, cello-like electronic drone instrument is best known for its appearance in several scores by celebrated Icelandic composer Hildur Guðnadóttir, including her work on the 2019 film “Joker”.

Trappes, however, approached it in her own way, lying on the floor with the halldorophone. She then sang into the various openings of the wooden body. “Hommelen” features four drone-like soundscapes, all of them recorded in a single take.

Trappes explains: “During a residency at EMS studios in Stockholm in December 2023,I experimented with the Halldorophone to discover how the cello-like electronic drone instrument created by Halldór Úlfarsson, used most famously in Hildur Gudnadóttir’s soundtrack to The Joker, might interact with my voice as a drone accompaniment – as opposed to how a cellist might approach it. I wanted to explore the erratic nature of its ‘personality’ and its wobbling and expressive feedback loops – would it respond to my specific voice? would my voice alter the drone?”

And she adds: “Once I turned the instrument on it became apparent that it had a mind of its own. I chose to tune it intuitively, based on emotional responses to the sounds the instrument was creating each time I approached it. Alone with the massive bass amp in the room feeding back into the instrument – into me – and back into the amp, it felt like I was a spiritual conduit. With my energies at one with the electricity and magnetics, carefully I leaned into each pickup one by one. I lay on the floor with the Halldorophone and sang a sustained vocal sound into the openings of its wooden body, prompting the instrument to respond to my voice. It was slow in the uptake so I followed its lead and sang along with its response. In a meditative state, I slowly manipulated the levels of the pickups for each of the eight strings to trigger different frequencies, all the while vocally following its unpredictable and unsettled feedback loop lead. Each piece on this release was recorded in one take as it was in that room.”

The full tape release is available now in pre-order on Bandcamp.

About Paralaxe Editions

Paralaxe Editions is a Barcelona-based record label, publishing house and multidisciplinary platform. Founded in 2014 by Dania, an Iraqi-born ambient/experimental artist and emergency doctor, it’s inspired by the concept of the parallax gap, the invisible space between two points that can seemingly never meet.

Paralaxe has been home to cassette, vinyl and book releases from artists like Sun Araw, Beatrice Dillion, Perila, Rupert Clervaux, Alloy Sea (a.k.a. Mor Elian), Penelope Trappes, Nina and ELLLL, and each month Dania hosts a Paralaxe Editions radio show at dublab BCN.

Bernard - Side-Line Staff

Chief editor of Side-Line – which basically means I spend my days wading through a relentless flood of press releases from labels, artists, DJs, and zealous correspondents. My job? Strip out the promo nonsense, verify what’s actually real, and decide which stories make the cut and which get tossed into the digital void. Outside the news filter bubble, I’m all in for quality sushi and helping raise funds for Ukraine’s ongoing fight against the modern-day axis of evil. Besides music I’m also an SEO and AI content flow specialist and have an interest in everything finance from stocks to crypto. There is music in everything!

side-line.com

(Photo by Agnes Haus) Out on April 14th is the new album from UK based Australian born dark ambient musician Penelope Trappes titled “Heavenly Spheres”.

The 8-track album will be released on the artist’s own label Nite Hive and will also be the label’s first release. All of the releases on the label will be released digitally and on limited-edition cassette tape accompanied by a podcast interview with each artist about their creative process. The first releases will include Patricia Wolf, Pefkin, Karen Vogt, and Madeliene Cocolas.

The label will launch on 14 April 2023 with Heavenly Spheres, an 8-piece album recorded during a two-week residency for Britten Pears Arts at the house where the composer, teacher and musicologist Imogen Holst lived in Aldeburgh, Suffolk. A first track from that release is available now, called “Entangled”.

“Heavenly Spheres” is the result of the artist experimenting with only her voice, an upright piano and an old German reel to reel tape deck.

Trappes explains: “I immersed myself in solitude and often deafening silence, and coexisted with an enormous amount of history and books. I grew to love this unfamiliar space as I recorded sound outside of my normal way of working, took long and sometimes psychedelic walks, channelled ghosts on tape, and ended up with about 35 pieces of music and sound art. This album is 8 of those pieces which I fell in love with.”

About Penelope Trappes

The musician debuted with material written and recorded in 2016 in a small piano studio in East London. Composed of mostly percussionless, reverb-heavy, atmospheres, the LP was released via Optimo Music in 2017. She then signed to the Houndstooth label and released her second album “Penelope Two” in 2018, a minimalist album built around field recordings, meditations, guitars, piano and reverb.

2019 saw the release of “Penelope Redeux” consisting of reworks of songs from “Penelope Two” by Cosey Fanni Tutti, Mogwai, Félicia Atkinson and Nik Colk Void. The “Eel Drip” EP followed in 2020 and “Penelope Three” was released in May 2021.

“Mother’s Blood”, a vocal-free meditative reinterpretation of “Penelope Three” was released on cassette at the end of that year.

Bernard - Side-Line Staff

Chief editor of Side-Line – which basically means I spend my days wading through a relentless flood of press releases from labels, artists, DJs, and zealous correspondents. My job? Strip out the promo nonsense, verify what’s actually real, and decide which stories make the cut and which get tossed into the digital void. Outside the news filter bubble, I’m all in for quality sushi and helping raise funds for Ukraine’s ongoing fight against the modern-day axis of evil. Besides music I’m also an SEO and AI content flow specialist and have an interest in everything finance from stocks to crypto. There is music in everything!

side-line.com

Cosey Fanni Tutti has reworked the Penelope Trappes track “Carry Me” for Trappes’ “Redeux” album which will be released June 7th on Houndstooth. The track is out as a standalone single.

Here’s some more info on this album. After the release of her sophomore solo album “Penelope Two”, Penelope Trappes and Houndstooth announce “Redeux”; an album of reworks of tracks from “Penelope Two”. On the album you find covers by Scottish post-rock legends Mogwai, Factory Floor member Nik Colk Void, Throbbing Gristle’s Cosey Fanni Tutti, Shelter Press label founder/producer/visual artist Félicia Atkinson, Throwing Snow, Icelandic multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Jófríður Ákadóttir aka JFDR, Poppy Ackroyd with Hidden Orchestra member and One Little Indian signee transposes Kismet on piano, Savages producer Jonny Hostile, Ben Frost and Tim Hecker collaborator and Sigur Ros’ musical director Paul Corley and Swedish techno duo Aasthma (Peder Mannerfelt and Pär Grindvik).

Full tracklist:

1. Burn On (Mogwai Rework)
2. Carry Me (Cosey Fanni Tutti Rework)
3. Maeve (JFDR Rework)
4. Farewell (Johnny Hostile Rework)
5. Night Hive (Paul Corley Rework)
6. Nite Hive (Nik Colk Void Rework)
7. Connector (Aasthma Rework)
8. Farewell (Throwing Snow Rework)
9. Kismet (Poppy Ackroyd Rework)
10. Burn On (Félicia Atkinson Rework)

Who is Penelope Trappes?

Penelope Trappes is a London based Australian born vocalist, musician and soundscape artist signed to Houndstooth. She spent 2016 writing and recording what would become her first solo album, “Penelope One” in a piano studio in East London. The LP was released via Optimo Music in 2017 on vinyl and as a photo book.

Penelope signed to Houndstooth in 2018 and released her sophomore LP (and photo book) “Penelope Two” in October 2018.

Bernard - Side-Line Staff

Chief editor of Side-Line – which basically means I spend my days wading through a relentless flood of press releases from labels, artists, DJs, and zealous correspondents. My job? Strip out the promo nonsense, verify what’s actually real, and decide which stories make the cut and which get tossed into the digital void. Outside the news filter bubble, I’m all in for quality sushi and helping raise funds for Ukraine’s ongoing fight against the modern-day axis of evil. Besides music I’m also an SEO and AI content flow specialist and have an interest in everything finance from stocks to crypto. There is music in everything!

side-line.com