It’s been the city’s motto since medieval times, but the phrase could also serve as a tagline for A Requiem, the spellbinding fifth album from Sydney-born composer, producer, and vocalist Penelope Trappes. Largely improvised and recorded alone in a borrowed, “womb-like” garden studio in Glasgow while cat-sitting for friends, A Requiem’s songs are fogged with ancestral grief, sometimes uncomfortably assertive, at other times softened by a revenant shimmer that floods in at their seams.

Listen carefully and what seems (and partly is) an album about the dead and the dying reveals itself to be a musical biography of strength. It honours strength. Reveres it, even. The strength to say no, the strength to carry on, the strength to say goodbye: it’s all here, written in the shadows with the blood of Trappes’ instinctive reckoning, not just with the tattered past but with the crumbling world of now.

In person, she is much softer and more animated than her sometimes severe imagery would suggest, her bright Australian accent ringing out against the backdrop of a sudden downpour that sends people scurrying indoors. Our meeting is in her adopted hometown of Brighton, where she’s lived since leaving London during the pandemic, and it’s a place that seems to suit her to a tee. Even the weather, as a recent trip home to Australia confirmed. “One day it was 41 degrees and I was like, ‘This is exactly why I don’t live here anymore,’” she says, pulling a face.

Over our 75 minutes together, she bounces generously between conversation topics from the beginnings of the universe to the end of civilisation, folding in her reading list and Kanye West’s pivot to Nazism (“Somebody, please help the man!”). The book currently on her bedside table is David Mitchell’s sci-fi fantasy The Bone Clocks, and the final chapters – set in a near-future of technological and societal breakdown – are feeling a little bit too close to home. “I often have these quite apocalyptic dreams,” she explains. “I’m trying not to be scared by them, but I really feel like we are in for a ride.”

For Trappes, it all comes down to actively seeking equilibrium, whether that’s through music or her meditation practice, her love of astrology and tarot, or the sweet release of acupuncture – anything to help her look at the ugliness around us and not feel consumed by it. “The energy is growing and the anger is real,” she says, referring not just to society as a whole but her own internal fire. “I just don’t want it to eat me up already.”

In this interview – the first in a new series of Reference Points – we dive deeper into five of the key themes and inspirations that fed into A Requiem, from the waves that rocked her to her steadfast refusal to sink.

PENELOPE TRAPPES: I’ve always veered into shadow work, whether it’s creative or personal. I’m a Scorpio ascendant. I just learned recently that my Lilith is in the first house. I believe in the cycles of life and death, and the fact that even in the darkest days of winter it’s possible to find hope in the knowledge that the light is going to come back. It’s a matter of balance, and I feel like I’m always working to find an equilibrium in everything I do. David Lynch is like my role model when it comes to balancing light and dark. He always did the shadow work so incredibly well, but he was also just this really beautiful person who was always searching for the light.

The artwork for the album, which I designed together with my manager and partner Agnes Haus, plays on this idea a bit. You have the lilies, which are classic funeral flowers, and they are towering over me. I’m turning in this sort of awkward and uncomfortable position, so it’s not clear if I’ve fallen into the ground or if I’m coming up out of the ground. Depending on how you look at it, it can represent hope – an island in a sea of black – or something more severe. The lilies actually came from the pond in my yard in Brighton. I’d been watching them grow all spring and knew that they would be a part of the artwork. The sickle that I cut them down with is also a part of it.

At the end of the Armageddon dream, I had this very vivid image of a young boy holding a red dove. At first I didn’t know what it meant and I had to meditate on it, but then it became clear that the red dove was a symbol or a conduit of all the bad things in the world and it was being held in the hands of this innocent kid. Agnes is non-binary and they asked me why it had to be a boy in the dream, and I think it’s because of all the masculine energy that white western colonialism has put into the world. It just made sense that it would be a boy.

I feel like this song has been a long time coming, especially since I became a mother at 28. That was a total metamorphosis for me. I feel like I came into some sort of new power and a new hope. I was so inspired by everything I was feeling, which was pure love.

BEST FIT: I read something you wrote on David Lynch and was struck by the phrasing. You said that he wanted his art to dominate people’s psyche, and I wonder where your own art stands in relation to that idea. What do you want your music to do to people’s brains?

I think what I am always trying to do with my work is to create a totally immersive experience, and I think that’s true for many artists, whether they are visual artists, musicians, or whatever. You’re giving so much, but you’re also just a conduit – like the red dove – and what you’re channelling is love. But you do need courage. It takes a lot of courage to get up and sing about vulnerable things, and I think you need to be banged around a bit in this world to continue to dig into the really deep stuff.

PENELOPE TRAPPES: Going into the album, I’d been listening to a lot of dirty, droney stuff and I knew I wanted to do a drone-based album. I tend to veer that way naturally, but I always want to sprinkle it with light.

In Harry Sword’s book, Monolithic Undertow: In Search of Sonic Oblivion, he mentions astronomer Andrew Fabian's research on the Perseus Cluster, a ’singing’ Black Hole, that produces a B-flat that's 57 octaves below middle C, approximately one million-billion times lower than the lowest sound audible to the human ear. The suggestion is that the sound of the universe, the Big Bang, was probably not dissimilar – an incredibly deep drone – and that sound is really the thing that all life comes from. Reading that, I was totally wowed and started to research ancient, drone-based music, particularly from India. Just vocals, drums, and drones. Wonderful stuff.

In the studio, I would create beds of drones using cello or an E-bow on my electric guitar and running that through some effects. I wanted to make weird harmonies that would do something to my brain, so I was just exploring the possibilities and seeing what inspired me. I find that creating drones puts me in a meditative space that opens up my consciousness and allows me to sort of channel things and let ideas take shape in that moment. With this album, I did go in with some lyrical ideas but beyond that it was all just improvisation.

BEST FIT: Your last two records, Heavenly Spheres and Hommelen, were created with quite narrow restrictions in terms of the instrumental palette. Did you go into A Requiem thinking that you would have restrictions, or did restrictions emerge during the process?

I guess I love minimalism as a rule, and working within the restrictions of minimalism, because I find that it’s better to start with something that’s not overly complicated. I can complicate things later if I want to, in post-production, but, for this album, in order to access the unknown, I needed to do it this way. There was a wall of synths at the studio but I knew I wasn’t going to touch them, so I did have restrictions.

I knew there would be cello and probably guitar, and I knew that I wanted to sing in a really guttural way, but also in an angelic, high way. On my last run of shows in the lead up to making this record, it was just me, no band, and I remember feeling like my voice had returned to me as my primary instrument. So, during the writing and recording of A Requiem, I worked on finding a balance of sound within my body.

In the year leading up to the album I’d been listening to a lot of neo-folk and drone-folk, and in particular to the album Funeral Folk by Maria W Horn and Sara Parkman, which is just wow. It inspired me to vocally want to try new and more powerful things. I needed to. It feels like our whole society and the standard world is crumbling around us, and we’re looking to find more holistic ways of being. So this album is me tearing down or smashing through certain walls with my voice, and it felt great.

I’ve always loved the idea that cello is the instrument that mimics the human voice most closely, which is something I learned many years back from Hildur Guðnadóttir.

Yes, same! I also learned it from my friend Maddie Cutter, who played on “Platinum”. She taught me that too.

As a child, I was always fascinated by the cello but I was never given the opportunity to play one, and I’ve felt very drawn to it ever since. The cello in the studio was the first thing that I would go to. I like the way you can hug a cello and how beautiful it feels to hold it. Before I picked up the cello I would light a candle and do my little ceremony to set the intention and space. Then, because I'm not trained and I don't know how to tune it, I just worked with whatever came from me and the cello.

Tell me about your little ceremony. How did you turn the studio into a place where you could access the unknown, as you say?

Well, every day, I do some yoga and some meditation and chanting, to help clear the head, unravel anything that’s blocked, and get my body into the zone. Going into the studio, I would sort of bless the space and cleanse it with sage and palo santo. Especially the first time I went in there, I did the whole room and each instrument. I was a guest in somebody else’s space so I needed to make it mine. I don’t remember the exact words I would have used, but it was vital to sort of cast the studio as my space for the next three weeks. It was midsummer in Glasgow so I would gather things from the garden – flowers, stones, feathers – and place them in the studio. I always like to bring natural things into the room when I travel.

PENELOPE TRAPPES: Going to back to what I was saying about Funeral Folk earlier, I feel like there’s a global movement where so many people are looking to the past and immersing themselves in ancient cultures because of the state of the world that we are in. There’s a lot of anger at the architects of this mess, and that anger comes with all this grief attached. I’m really glad I changed the name of the album from Furorem to A Requiem, because it’s not just about anger. There are almost ecclesiastical moments to it, but it’s nothing to do with the church. I call it pagan liturgy.

There are quite a few symbols on this album, and one of them is an old pagan rune called the Hagal or 'hag-all' rune, which is hand-drawn on the artwork and on side B of the vinyl. It's a symbol that was co-opted by the Christian church, who described it as the body of Christ. It's really two runes put together: an x-cross rune that represents the universe and a rune that looks like a P, called the Pard rune, or the rune of the Son.

I find runology fascinating, and I want to learn how to divine with them. I also want to learn how to make my own. I went to a local timberyard in Brighton, figuring that they’d probably think I was crazy but I wanted to ask anyway. As it turns out, Rick, a man who works there, was an old pagan guy and he was able to share all this knowledge with me about runes.

BEST FIT: How does one go about making their own runes?

Rick gave me the inside scoop that if I’m making runes for other people, which is what I was thinking of doing – as gifts or maybe even merch – you can use pretty much any type of hard wood, like wood from a cherry tree or apple tree. But you can’t cut it across the diameter of the tree trunk. You have to split the wood down the middle otherwise your rune will eventually split and no longer be of any use.

If you want to make runes for yourself, he told me that you need to use the wood from an ash tree. Ash is the tree of sacrifice. The Norse god Odin sacrificed himself by hanging himself from an ash tree as a way of gaining access to the secrets of the runes. I’ve read online that you should ask for the tree’s blessing to take from it. Also, it can’t be green wood – it has to be old and dry, and ideally already fallen on the ground.

When it comes to carving, I do think that’s more special than burning a symbol into the wood with a pyrography pen, although I do have one of those at home.

PENELOPE TRAPPES: I think I’ve always been searching for female role models who are strong and warrior-like and lovers of nature. Women who are respected for something, whether it’s their physical prowess or their knowledge. Women like the Nordic seeress Heiðr from the mythological poem Völuspá and the Irish ‘phantom queen’ Mórrigan – both of which have made it into my earlier songs. Also, queen Boudicca.

I think part of my fascination with Celtic mythology comes from being a child of colonialism, being raised in a land that’s not my land. Coming back to the UK and settling here was really important to me. I don’t know my official lineage, but my intuition is that I come from Celtic ancestors who were strong women, so I seek them out whenever I can and learn everything I can about them.

With the bandorai, who were these Celtic druid priestesses who were bonded with nature and their communities, I feel like it’s a continuing education. There’s so much to learn because we’re talking centuries of history when it comes to druidry. On this album, these women became a sort of symbol for me of the importance of becoming strong on the inside. Obviously it’s lovely to be in touch with your feminine energy, but I do get concerned when it’s in the service of patriarchy. I don’t want to get too preachy, but I worry that women can lose so much time in the service of patriarchy when they could be using that time to become strong in themselves.

As a woman, you need to have your strength up otherwise how can we navigate this life? How do we navigate around things that we might be carrying around from a past life? There’s a lot of stuff that women experience that’s very difficult to swallow, whether it’s mental, physical, or sexual. For me, I find that the most helpful thing is to look at these challenges as a warrior woman would do, and find a way to get through.

BEST FIT: Here’s a question that’s been on my mind a lot lately. Do you think there are some things that cannot be healed, only cocooned away and healed around?

I think that’s an honest way to look at healing, because you can spend your whole life trying to mend a wound. I’m a Virgo, and the ruling planet of Virgo is Chiron in modern astrology. In Greek mythology, Chiron was the wounded healer, and I think you have to surrender to the existence of the wound because you can’t solve it away. You have to learn to move through the pain and learn to live with it, whether that’s through talking therapy or acupuncture, which I’ve found really helpful. For most of my adult life I’ve also used astrology to aid the healing process, but it can come from all kinds of things. I think it’s part of being a bandorai.

I have a lot of empathy for people who struggle with the healing process and, in some tiny way, I hope that someone might listen to A Requiem and find a little bit of strength in it or have a little cry, because that’s how you move through things – step by step. I’m a late bloomer in life, partly because I spent so much time processing a lot of familial chaos. Our family was strict and appeared to quite relatively normal, but, in my case, after I left home and started to unravel some of that mess I was like, huh. I love my family, but it’s not a mistake that I live on the other side of the world.

The song “Sleep” on A Requiem was actually written within a day of having a big blow up with one of my sisters, who was visiting me at the house I was staying in in Glasgow. We’ve always had a contentious love–hate relationship, but this was a huge eruption. I was fully shaking with anger. Having her in my space felt invasive and allowed all these shadows that I’ve been haunted by in life to crowd into the rooms.

I’m very fortunate that, as an artist, I can process things through my practice, so this blow up was actually really cathartic for me in a way. As I was saying before, it gave me the strength to break down certain walls that I had built around myself. They just crumbled away and gave me something new that felt solid and raw, and the song came together in quite a focused way from that.

PENELOPE TRAPPES: At first I was nervous about sharing this record, but the more it evolved as an entity, I started to realise that it’s not about me and that my little story is a part of a much bigger picture of female empowerment and coming to terms of the fact that we’re all going to die. We’re all going to have to come to terms with our own mortality and the mortality of our loved ones. It’s just part of life.

I was in Lewes for Bonfire Night last November when I got these panicked WhatsApp messages from my sisters – who are both nurses – saying that my 87-year-old dad had fallen and was in hospital. He was stable, but he wound up in hospital for six weeks and there were other things going wrong with his body after around the third or fourth week. One of my sisters works in palliative care and she said that she didn’t think he was going to make it.

In the weeks between November 5 and the time I flew back to Australia, I’d been doing a lot of grieving. I pulled out all these old family photos of my dad before he became a father, from when he was baby through to his 20s, and looked at him as not just my dad but as someone who had a life before that. I was talking to his ancestors – my ancestors – and it was quite emotional, though now it’s kind of funny because he’s still alive. He got better when I arrived. He’s probably a moon in Taurus or something. Very stubborn. I wouldn’t be surprised.

Once everything stabilised I came to the realisation that this visit was probably going to be my farewell to him, because I couldn’t keep travelling to the other side of the world whenever something happened. He’s in a nursing home now. My mum is 83 and she has advanced Parkinson’s that we’ve known about since I was a teenager. Knowing that someone close to you has a progressive disease is a particular kind of grief – “anticipatory grief,” as a friend of mine labelled it – and I sometimes wonder how much that has impacted our home and our lives.

On the one hand, I was very emotionally calm while I was in Australia. I was there to help my sisters sort out logistics and to alleviate my parents from the boredom of old age. It was really cute when I first arrived, though. My dad is not emotionally demonstrative at all, but he held my hand so tightly. He was so like a little child, and it was possibly the most beautiful moment I’ve seen in him. It’s funny because I overheard him saying to one of the nurses in the hospital, “Well, it’s a bit morbid that she’s here,” and then he got better.

BEST FIT: You’ve talked in the past about always having a slightly morbid fascination with death and trying to understand the mystery of it. Do you feel like you have gotten any closer to that?

A little bit. I think seeing both my elderly parents in sleeping mode back in Australia was quite shocking, because it was almost like they were dead because their bodies looked very different.

I’ve done a lot of research about death over the years. Even in university, I studied a subject in the theology department called ‘Death and dying.’ I was 20 then, but as I’ve grown older I’ve become maybe a bit more loving about death and feeling like maybe it’s not something to be so scared of. We don’t know what’s coming when we die. It remains the biggest mystery of them all, and possibly the most beautiful. I’m definitely becoming more curious about the other side. It’s this great unknown and it’s okay if we surrender to that.

That was my word of the year in 2023 – surrender – because if we surrender then we let go of our control, and if we let go of that control then we’re not trying to hold it all in, which comes back to fear again.

On the final song on A Requiem, “Thou Art Mortal”, the last sound we hear is the sound of dripping water, which I interpreted almost like a liquid hourglass reminding us that time is running out. Was that something you were thinking about?

That song is really about the fluidity of human life and the analogy that life is a river that carries us along and returns us to the sea at the end. I’m singing in Gaelic on that song, and it’s just seven words – “cuan / eas / loch / na mara / dooh drooch” – which means ocean, waterfall, lake, out to sea, and black starling. The ‘black’ part was more for the phonetics, I think, because I liked the sound of the words together.

“Thou Art Mortal” is partly inspired by a dream that my father had. He’s never told me about another dream in his whole life, but he told me this one dream about being in a boat with two of his childhood friends. He remembered that the boat was going with the current rather than against it, which is symbolically a good thing, but there was a giant snail coming up over the sides of the boat that morphed into a huge, golden orb spider, which is an Australian species. My dad has never worn flip flops the entire time I’ve known him, but apparently he was wearing them in this boat, took one of them off, and started to bash the spider with it until it was dead.

After he told me that I analysed it and it felt so obvious to me what the dream was about. He has been a carer for my mum as her Parkinson’s has become more advanced, and I think the dream was an expression of him wanting to be free of this slowly crawling anticipatory grief. My parents have always been very close, to the point where us three sisters were sometimes like, “Hey, we’re over here,” so it was interesting to me that he got to a point where he was absolutely fed up and he was dreaming of killing this thing.

When I think of flowing out to sea, I also think about the some kind of ending to a movie. But mostly I just love being in water. I love the feeling of weightlessness you get when you swim. And I love that we as humans are made of water, mostly. Water and starlight.