Penelope Trappes at Sacred Trinity Church
Johnny James, Managing Editor
Salford’s Sacred Trinity Church becomes a gothic dreamland as Penelope Trappes brings A Requiem to the fitting Chapel Street venue.
The Australian-born, Brighton-based Penelope Trappes cut her teeth in the 2010s, as one half of the moody NYC disco duo The Golden Filter, before reaching towards something more otherworldly in her solo work. Her early triptych of albums saw her become a cult favourite in the dark ambient realm, drawing inspiration from everyone from the Cocteau Twins to Scott Walker, Grouper to Björk.
Less songs, more abstract images filled her 2023 album, Heavenly Spheres, which traded in haunted-sounding pianos, sub-bass rumbles and eerie atmospherics – as if made for a surreal horror film set in some desolate future. Her airy, clos-mic’d voice often only added to the abstraction, positioning her as some kind of medium summoning lost souls.
For that album, Trappes mainly limited herself to a palate of voice, piano and a vintage reel-to-reel tape deck. She doesn’t set such limitations for album number five, which breaks open a much larger soundworld, full of electronics, vintage instruments and strings. From the singles we’ve heard so far, this yields powerful results.
As part of the writing process, Trappes travelled to Scotland, where she isolated herself completely. Via meditation and psychedelics she accessed parts of herself she’d long desired to cleanse, facing her demons head on. The resulting album is a raw, spiritual journey – as vulnerable and compelling as the experience itself must have been.
A Requiem collects 10 ambient soundscapes – incantations of dreams and nightmares, death and grief, power and autonomy. The three singles that have been released so far revel in gothic experimentalism, with historical and generational traumas exorcised before our ears.
According to the artist, the synth-heavy ‘Red Dove’ documents “a dream about humanity becoming numb, stripped of emotion, and completely lost in their pain. Sleepwalking. Swallowing the Bitter Pill”. Transcendent cello drones and clattering percussion power ‘Platinum’, in which Trappes’ voice comes to the fore, “mourning of the growing distance between family, homeland, mortality awareness, and the inevitability of death.”
‘Sleep’, meanwhile, is more heavy and punishing, drawing on “a dream my father had with echoes of Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare”. For the macabre video (above), local actress Maxine Peake joins Kate Dickie alongside Trappes herself, depicting a haunting exchange between a sleeper and “the hag” – a supernatural creature that is often seen by those who experience sleep paralysis. Trappes has always needed a horror film. Now she’s got one (albeit in miniature).
Hearing such demons exorcised in the grand surrounds of Sacred Trinity Church should be very powerful indeed. But for god’s sake – don’t tell the vicar.
