A Pilgrimage and a Garden Shed Yield Josephine Illingworth’s Found-Sound Folk

Josephine Illingworth’s debut EP, The Golden Valley, arrives via Practise Music with none of the usual self-­presentation. The five songs come from a garden shed in London, where the former chorister built what she calls a found-­sound fantasy world. A week spent walking and sleeping in medieval churches along the Golden Valley Pilgrim Way supplied the raw material. She recorded storm noise through stone walls, the creak of a church door, footsteps on mud, and later pressed these fragments into folk forms that don’t behave much like folk at all.

Her voice, trained in cathedral choirs, floats through arrangements patched together from harmonium, broken piano, and the ambient hum of the shed itself. There’s no band, no live percussion, just layers of Illingworth and the places she passed through. The pilgrimage wasn’t a metaphor for the record. It was the whole process. She walked 80 kilometers with gear, dried clothes on radiators in church naves, and let the physical experience shape the music directly. Vicars left tea and camp beds. She left with tapes.

The result is an EP that leans into texture without ever sacrificing melody. Singing about loss, isolation, and landscape, Illingworth treats the pastoral not as nostalgia but as a laboratory. The noises don’t decorate the songs; they push them somewhere less settled. That instinct, blending the controlled with the chaotic, echoes contemporaries like Clarissa Connelly and Lankum while sounding very much like its own thing.

Practise Music, the London label behind the release, has a quiet but consistent ear for off-­centre folk. The Golden Valley fits their catalogue, yet it’s also a debut that doesn’t need the label’s reputation to explain itself. The songs do that work on their own. That’s rare, and worth paying attention to.