Josephine Illingworth credits Nature on Who Burnt the Mountain
Josephine Illingworth's new single gives NATURE a co-credit. It is built on a recording of women she met in the Himalayas, and half the royalties go to conservation.
BY JOLT Staff · SEP 21 2026 · 1 min read"Who Burnt the Mountain" is credited to Josephine Illingworth and NATURE, and the London experimental-folk composer plays that second billing straight. The song is built on a recording of women she met and stayed with while travelling in the Himalayas. Half its royalties go to conservation programmes worldwide.
It follows Bright Things I Found In The Dark, the seven-song EP she released earlier this year. The instinct is the same: folk songs that argue with the ground they stand on.
“It is also an angry song, a lament, in a way, for the places that have been lost this summer in the wildfires, and more widely the places that have been lost systematically over many years.”
The single arrived 21 September 2026 with Sounds Right, the initiative that credits Nature as an official recording artist and sits inside Brian Eno's EarthPercent foundation. More than 300 artists have partnered with it, Dry Cleaning and Modern Woman among them, and $2.5 million has been granted. The video was shot in the hills of Shropshire last winter.
Illingworth says the song "is about those experiences, of finding real sanctuary in wild places, of finding a home there." She calls it angry too, a lament for what this summer's wildfires took and for what has been lost systematically over many years. The voices she carried home sit inside the take rather than beside it, which is the difference between a collaboration and a sample.
This sits with the EarthPercent roster, and with anyone who plays folk for the recordings inside it. It will not convert a listener who needs a chorus to hold.
Scale is the flaw: a single track has to carry a lament spanning decades inside four minutes. The title asks a question the track does not answer.
A 3.5. The interpolation does what a written statement could not, and the anger is aimed, not sprayed. Half the royalties go to the ground it is about.
