Hommelen by Penelope Trappes

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 center 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 byproduct 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.

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Watch the video for "Harmonic No.1," recorded at EMS in Stockholm
https://youtu.be/Vofhck6b7hU

“intimate and surreal—like watching yourself mourn intense tragedy from an outsider’s vantage point.” -Bandcamp

"the sound of dust motes momentarily caught in a shaft of moonlight, of spirits pushing through from another realm. Alluring yet unsettling.” -Electronic Sound

"striking work of evolution and deconstruction" -The Wire

“Summoning the great ghosts of vintage 4AD and Kranky” -Pitchfork

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