Penelope Trappes

Esoteric soundscaper Penelope Trappes embraces an elemental approach to production. Danny Turner discusses the techniques behind new EP, Eel Drip

Australian-born Penelope Trappes began her musical career in a Brisbane-based indie band before relocating to New York and developing experimental electronic projects Locke and Priscilla Sharp. In 2008, she teamed up with partner Stephen Hindman to create the electronic duo The Golden Filter and a decade later released her debut solo album Penelope One, which garnered praise for its heavily layered, dystopian sound.

Trappes signed to the Houndstooth label the following year for the release of her critically acclaimed Penelope Two, accompanying her largely percussion-less approach with more gothic introspection. With Penelope Three set to complete the trilogy next spring, Trappes first treats us to Eel Drip – a four-track EP that protracts her audacious production aesthetic based on heavily reverbed found sounds, acoustic instruments and vocals.

Being near or in water seems to be a prominent theme of your music and visuals

“I’m definitely all-embracing of the natural elements in general. On an elemental and emotional level, I feel water symbolises the emotions and is a way to access the dark and the light. There may be a subconscious influence on the sounds I choose, but they also come from field recordings and meditation techniques that I use to open up creativity. Intuition plays heavily into what I do. If most artists are honest, that’s where they find their perspective.”

What themes are you typically writing about on the new EP, Eel Drip?

“The songs and visuals were staggered. Thematically, I do tend to veer into the darker, gothic side of life, but post-Covid I feel the tracks came into fruition because they started to highlight our modern anxiety and mental health issues arising from that. In the video where I’m in the bath and the water’s dripping over me, I was freezing because the water wouldn’t run warm [laughs], but the tenseness and feeling of being frozen in a place and time ties back into the whole concept. Lyrically, the song is based on a Celtic pagan goddess called Morrigan and the foreboding stampede of animals… the wolf that scares and the eel that trips, which sounds like drips. I got right into that.”

Are you looking to create sounds from scratch to portray your aquatic themes?

“I might stumble across a certain arpeggiated sound or synth pad that definitely feels like the correct one – and that can be a conscious decision or a happy accident, but I sometimes feel like my creativity’s being driven by something you can’t intellectualise. I come from a very hippy town in Australia. I meditate and do yoga – the whole nine yards. Whether you know it or not, when you’re being creative there are times when turning off your mind allows some force to help guide you into making decisions. I definitely believe in humanity’s collective consciousness. You can see how it plays out with politics – the frenzy and anxiety that’s led up to the US election is inexplicable.”

Afraid is a cover of a Nico track from the ’70s. What inspired you to put your stamp on it?

“I’m actually quite a happy person but do resonate with sadness and those types of characters. Nico was always a bit tragic. She was beautiful on the outside but had such complexity and struggled through her whole creative life to let the audience know that about her. I find that fascinating. Like myself, she also had a child and our careers moved around that. I get the feeling that Afraid was written to her child and resonated with that even though her version was written in the 1970s. I took it and contemporised it, creating a lusher landscape with a vocoder effect to give it an extra-terrestrial vibe.”

Your vocal often sounds like Gregorian chanting. Do you set vocals at different pitches and overlay them to achieve that effect?

“As mentioned, I used a vocoder to create different vocal layers and if it does come off as if it’s emulating Gregorian chants that’s awesome. The layers give it that lushness and depth of harmony. My operatic influences are also always there whether it comes through an effect or otherwise. I was a soprano and while I don’t think I could be anymore, I loved that my body could create this massive sound even though I’m not a big person physically. I have an album coming out next year on Houndstooth, and the opening track is a mixture of those sounds and elements of Celtic/Gaelic folk music, which I feel are very complementary to my creative world.”

You’re Australian, but spent time in NY and are settled in the UK now. Have you been patiently building a home studio setup?

“It wasn’t as easy as it could have been. A lot of instruments were sold when I left New York because my partner and I have another project called The Golden Filter and it was sad that we had to sell a few synths. I’m in Brighton now, but I spent over six years in London slowly building up my equipment. I’m a minimalist anyway and not really into capitalist consumption, so I prefer to make do with what I have.”

Many artists seem to prefer to limit themselves

“You don’t have to play ten different synths to get the effect you’re trying to achieve. My primary instrument is my voice and a lot of those initial creative moments come from that and I prefer to use production to layer things. I’ll tend to use the Arturia Micro Brute and get completely lost tweaking the frequency and resonance. Between those two processes I tend to create these undulating tones and move forward from there.”

You also use a lot of acoustic materials and shape them with technology…

“It definitely starts on a more organic level, which could be just guitar and voice or piano and voice and layer from there. Also field recordings… if I hear the