Back in April we previewed Bright Things I Found In The Dark, the new EP from Josephine Illingworth. “The work of London-based musician and multi-disciplinary [artist] sits at the intersection of song, storytelling and soundscape,” we wrote, “drawing on traditions of folk music and folklore but with a modern, experimental edge.” The release collapses the line between the folk song and field recording, Illingworth’s vocals melding with the surrounding environment, or else the environment bleeding into her own personality. The result is a concept album which spins an entire mythology, taking threads of the natural, the personal and the fantastical and weaving something unique. “When I made this EP I was quite sad,” Illingworth explains:
I was going to a lot of churches and walking a lot and living in my head, and I found I was making this kind of personal folklore out of the things I encountered each day. I walked a pilgrimage and slept in churches over the middle of winter, and collected field recordings which became the backbone of this EP. One week I found three dead birds, so that became a symbol, or for a while I’d always cycle under this telephone pylon and each time I’d get an electric shock in the same hand. I wrote and photographed these things, recorded a lot of sounds, and mythologised a lot.
In a way the EP is another of those folklores, a mythology I wrapped around my own life so that when I looked out at it the colours were different. In another way it’s a true story, of a girl who meets a great sadness and then meets a mountain. In a way it’s a fairytale – filled with wolves and bells and river gods. It’s also about nature and the wild as a sacred and living thing, and of all things being connected in a small, and big, way. It’s messy and thick and bristling with sounds because of that.”
To celebrate the release of the EP, Josephine Illingworth has unveiled final single ‘Hail’, and there is no better place to dive in. Because while each track is striking in its own right, Bright Things I Found In The Dark is essentially a story, and as with any story it is best to start at the beginning. This is the tale of a girl in a fictional land populated by wolf mothers, goddesses and great natural spectacles. One which features mysterious strangers, burgeoning loves, even its own cosmology. Think of ‘Hail’ as the origin story of this universe, then let yourself get swept away by the narrative.