Videos
PENELOPE TRAPPES shares new track & video “Fur & Feather”
Australian-born Brighton-based musician Penelope Trappes has shared a new single/video, “Fur & Feather,” from her forthcoming album ‘Penelope Three’, out May 28th on Houndstooth.
Following lead single/video “Nervous,” “Fur & Feather“ highlights the relationship between Trappes’ music and her bold visual identity. The video, self-directed again in collaboration with art collective Agnes Haus, visualizes the track’s ethereal, heady tone as Trappes’ movements are slowed down, mimicking her vocals as they inch above serene piano and reverberated guitar.
Trappes elaborates on the track: “I wrote ‘Fur & Feather’ after becoming inspired by the Celtic mythological tale of The Selkie, which is about ‘homing’ – returning to a sense of Self. I found this treasure within the well-known book Women Who Run With Wolves by Dr. Clarissa Pinkes Estés. In preparation for the inevitable day that my sole daughter would leave home after 18 years, I carried a great sense of bittersweet loss in my heart. The Selkie reminded me of how I always knew the time would come when I’d be physically and emotionally alone and because of this I have always kept my own identity intact.”
Where ‘Penelope One’ explored aspects of birth and rebirth and the power of the female body, and ‘Penelope Two’ was centred around the acknowledgment of grief and how we carry our own stories of loss, ‘Penelope Three’ is about healing the stories held in her body by surrendering to universal love. In it, she explores her metamorphosis through tales of motherhood, the divine feminine, anxiety, healing powers and their spiritual connections through vocal loops, piano and guitar drenched in reverb, all underpinned by subterranean drones. She looks not just to release herself from the grieving process in Penelope Two, but also of societal anxieties, embracing the generational shift that is happening as her daughter grows up, her mother gets older and how she sees the world drastically changing.
“I’m digging up the underworld with visual motifs, and a mystical, gothic darkness that symbolises my struggles” she says of Penelope Three. “Yet the universal message is that of overcoming our fears to allow the love in. This is the healing.”
On ‘Penelope Three’, Trappes wears her breadth of life experiences with pride; pain, joy, love, loss, and the freedom in accepting change and acknowledging lessons learnt. It is a celebration of womanhood and a testament to the wisdom acquired through living and allowing oneself to live.
Penelope Trappes live dates:
13 May The Great Escape, Brighton *Live Stream*
24 Jul SNNTG Festival, Hannover
23 Sept The White Hotel, Manchester
24 Sept The Alchemy Experiment
25 Sept Future Yard, Birkenhead
26 Sept Attenborough Arts Centre, Leicester
30 Sept The Rose Hill, Brighton
12 Nov St Pancras Church, London