Josephine Illingworth gives half of the song Who Burnt the Mountain to conservation

Josephine Illingworth has put out a song called Who Burnt the Mountain, and half of what it earns will go to nature conservation work. The Line of Best Fit reports that the London composer released it through Sounds Right, a global initiative that credits Nature as an official recording artist so that a share of streaming income flows to conservation rather than to a person.

The song came out of a journey rather than a commission. Writing to her newsletter, Illingworth traced it back to time spent travelling in the Himalayas, where she stayed with families who, as she put it, "made me see the landscape as fundamentally alive". A recording of those women is interpolated into the track itself, which turns the credit into something closer to a document than a sample.

She describes the song as being about finding real sanctuary in wild places and finding a home in them. She also calls it an angry song and a lament, written for the places lost in this summer's wildfires and for the ones lost slowly over decades. The two readings are not in tension: the song is a record of somewhere that still exists and a warning about how quickly that stops being true.

The video was shot in the hills of Shropshire last winter, several thousand miles from the mountains that prompted the writing, and the choice reads as deliberate rather than convenient. A song about landscape being alive works harder when it is filmed in a landscape nobody would call exotic.

Who Burnt the Mountain follows Bright Things I Found In The Dark, the seven-song EP Illingworth released earlier this year. She works in experimental folk, which in practice means a small and quiet body of work that almost no outlet covers, and which makes a partnership with a foundation the size of EarthPercent a genuinely unusual line on her record.

EarthPercent describes itself as the music industry's climate foundation and asks artists to give a small percentage of their income, whether from streaming, touring, merchandise or a one-off project, to organisations working on the climate and nature crises. More than 300 artists have signed up, among them Dry Cleaning, Imogen Heap, Death Cab for Cutie, Jarvis Cocker, The Weather Station and Modern Woman. The foundation says it has granted $2.5 million so far.

The Sounds Right mechanism is the part worth watching. Crediting Nature as an artist means the money arrives as royalties rather than as a donation, which routes it through the same infrastructure that pays everybody else and makes it recurring instead of one-off. Other acts have reached for structural rather than charitable fixes lately, as when Sub Focus put a pound from every ticket into the grassroots venue levy.

The single is out now with no parent release attached. Our release calendar carries the rest of the quarter's records, and the indie hub has the week's other releases, including Claire Cronin's Before The End Of Time, another song this week about a world that ends.