For approximately one month I’ve started my day with a good habit: every morning, while making the bed and preparing myself for work, I push play on the Bandcamp app and I listen to the spotlight songs of the New and Notable section: I must say that this introduced me to a lot of interesting artists, one of those is who is we talking about, Penelope Trappes.
The Australian songwriter, actually based in Brighton (UK), published her new full length on April 4 via One Little Independent Records, that published records from Chumbawamba, Skunk Anansie and has been the home for Björk for several decades (most of them under a previous name, before the label changed its name a few years ago).
A Requiem is a deep and intense album, on which Penelope Trappes deals with themes like death, generational trauma and rebirth. I liked this record from my first spin for its depth. Every single track is wonderfully crafted to wrap the listener in the dimension created by Trappes.
It’s not easy to put this record into a specific genre and also is not fair. We can ear a lot of influences and a lot of styles like Ambient, Drone, Folk, Electronics and even Gregorian chants; in fact, this record is able to create a soundscape of sacredness throughout his listening.
This album is able to summon dormant emotions within us, with its instrumental and with the chants by Penelope. Darkness and mysticism are brought to us in these songs, which personally, I could listen to continuously.
Trappes travelled to Scotland and isolated herself completely to write music. She was seeking solitude in the land of her Celtic ancestry to achieve an intense and cathartic writing experience; as we can read on her Bandcamp page “Amidst meditative and psychedelic states, she channeled demons and accessed parts of herself she’d long desired to cleanse. ‘A Requiem’ is a musical service in honour of the dead, a sanctuary Trappes built for herself to explore familial chaos and history.”
When we start this record we are welcomed by ”Bandorai”, that starts with a cello and a rising feedback. This song is a shamanic chant dedicated to the ancient priestess of the Celts, the Bandorai, and just from this first song we can feel the cathartic emotions that Penelope embosses on this record.
Further along in the following tracks, Trappes continues her songwriting in a journey throughout her ancestry building an immense soundscape. The reverberating voices and the instruments collide with the dry drums, creating dreamy spaces broken by a single hit of the drum.
”Sleep” is one of the more interesting songs on this record: quiet passages, where the voice seems to find some sort of difficulty to come out, alternate with sound explosions in which music and words find their freedom.
”Red Dove” dives into a more electronic path starting with a synth pad followed by an arpeggio. This track caught my attention and is my favourite on the album: the sounds grow in volume and the instruments we can hear also increase, disappearing with a single drum beat; then one by one the instruments return, becoming bigger and occupying more space than before. # A Requiem is an album that requires careful and repeated listening to fully grasp its complexity and beauty. It is a work in which many emotions have been inserted to achieve this result, offering the listener a deeply emotional and reflective experience.
