Cryptic Artist SHHE supports Brighton-based Australian vocalist, producer and multi-instrumentalist Penelope Trappes alongside the release of her fifth full-length album ‘A Requiem’.
SHHE is a Scottish-Portuguese sound artist, musician and producer based in Dundee, Scotland. Her multidisciplinary work explores themes of identity and connection at the intersection of sound, space, environment and ecology. Sound works, performances and installations have been presented at V&A Dundee co-commissioned by MSCTY Tokyo, Sonica Glasgow, Dundee Contemporary Arts, Edinburgh Festival, Celtic Connections, Cryptic Nights, Radiophrenia (Scotland), and in Portugal, Iceland, Italy, Brazil, Egypt, and Iraq-Kurdistan.
Her eponymous debut album ‘SHHE’ was released by One Little Independent Records and shortlisted for Scottish Album of the Year. In 2024, mini-album ‘DÝRA’ was released to critical acclaim.
Formally trained in opera and jazz in her youth, Penelope Trappes swaddles her voice and poetics in brooding atmospherics underpinned by subterranean drone. She released her acclaimed trilogy, ‘Penelope One’, ‘Two’ and ‘Three’, on Fabric’s Houndstooth label. In between instalments of her ambitious trilogy, Penelope released a clutch of both experimental and more dreampop-oriented EPs. She demonstrated her versatility in the extended 25-minute deep-listening composition ‘Gnostic State’, and the arpeggiated electronics and minimalist songwriting on the ‘Eel Drip’ EP, which was accompanied by image and film inspired by Francesca Woodman’s 1970s series of nude self-portraits with eels. She also released an album of reworks, ‘Penelope Redeux’, with contributions by Cosey Fanni Tutti, Mogwai, Félicia Atkinson and Nik Colk Void, and the cassette, ‘Mother’s Blood,’ a vocal-free meditative reinterpretation of ‘Penelope Three’ concluding with the live-scoring of a 1-hour film at Sonica Festival.
Penelope’s fourth album, ‘Heavenly Spheres’, was released in 2023 on her own Nite Hive imprint, was composed using just piano, voice and an old reel-to-reel tape deck during a two-week artist residency for Britten Pears Arts at the house where the composer, teacher and musicologist Imogen Holst lived in Aldeburgh, Suffolk. Most recently, 2024’s ‘Hommelen’, the austere and beautifully severe result of her Halldorophone residency at EMS Stockholm was released on Paralaxe Editions.
