Mysterious Australian artist Penelope Trappes has been releasing her otherworldly music for the best part of ten years, mainly through Houndstooth. Her first release for OLI, A Requiem, came out back in the spring of 2025, but there was more material left over from the sessions that demanded release; so Æternum gathers together those leftover pieces that were too good to overlook.
The seven tracks are spread across a limited EP or are available as a download and opens with the distant choral sensibilities of “Requiem Æternum”, and immediately you are transported to some abandoned building, a vast sepulchre around which the voice echoes unhindered.
A deep rumble changes the mood and the voice is surrounded, and feels diminished as the sound swells. Tension builds and ominous clouds gather as the sound circles with what sounds like a bassoon lightening the shadows, but only briefly. Things swell and sway, the shadow ever-present and resonating; but when the voice is alone, it retains a folky quality as if adrift in the cosmos, resounding as if it were the last voice in existence.
There are some echoes of the kind of desolate soundworlds that Liz Harris generates as Grouper, but Penelope pushes things into even more remote territory, the sounds produced by the last person on Earth, left to echo in infinity.
-Mr Olivetti-
