PENELOPE TRAPPES
NEW TAPE RELEASE FOR PARALAXE EDITIONS - HOMMELEN - OUT 7 JUNE 2024
WATCH THE VIDEO FOR ‘HARMONIC NO. 1’
RECORDED AT EMS, STOCKHOLM BY AGNES HAUS
Penelope Trappes has shared details of Hommelen, her forthcoming tape for Paralaxe Editions, out on 7 June 2024, alongside the video for ‘Harmonic No. 1’ filmed by Agnes Haus at EMS, Stockholm.
Watch the video HERE
Penelope Trappes’ music has always trafficked in ominous textures and the haunted corners of the avant-garde, but Hommelen finds the UK-based Australian pushing her songcraft into dramatic new extremes, occupying a formless space in which the physicality of sound takes centre stage.
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 Academy Award-winning work on the 2019 film Joker. Trappes, however, approached it as a veritable novice, intuitively tuning the instrument based upon her own emotional responses to the sounds it emitted. Lying on the floor with the halldorophone, she reacted in real time as she sang into the various openings of its wooden body. It was an unorthodox process, to be sure, and one that took Trappes far outside of her usual comfort zone. While her past releases have been filled with moody laments, evocative dream pop and relatively conventional instrumentation, Hommelen features four intensely meditative, drone-like soundscapes, all of them recorded in a single take. The by product of an almost symbiotic bond between Trappes and the halldorophone, the music does contain a certain cinematic flair, but there’s no pomp or pageantry here. Hommelen taps into something deeper, its patient groans and scratchy tendrils of reverb exuding an almost primordial sensibility.
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?
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.”
Hommelen will be released on 7 June 2024 on Paralaxe Editions
Pre-order the album HERE
Hommelen tracklisting (PXE17)
Harmonic No. 2
Harmonic No. 3
Harmonic No. 4
Editors Notes
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. Navigating that nebulous zone is at the heart of Paralaxe’s mission, which seeks connection and transcendence via the cross-cultural exploration of avant-garde sounds, the creation of tangible objects, the curation of events and the platforming of perspectives that might otherwise go unheard. 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), Nina and ELLLL, and each month Dania hosts a Paralaxe Editions radio show at dublab BCN.
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