COMPOSER · IMMERSIVE ARTIST · BUILDER OF WORLDS
JEMIMA
PHILLIPS
Creating cinematic sonic worlds for brands, productions and cultural spaces.
From the Royal Household to a valley in the Wye, Jemima Phillips has spent her life building worlds in sound — and she has finally found the landscape big enough to hold them.
From the electric harp to composing for the world’s most recognised brands, she is now doing the most ambitious thing of her life — turning a 65-acre ancient estate into a living sound installation.
Music is not something you listen to — it is somewhere you go. She is still going.
ORIGINS
Jemima’s path as an electronic artist began not in a conservatoire but in the underground. Her teenage years were shaped by Warp Records and Ninja Tunes — by Aphex Twin, Massive Attack, Boards of Canada, and the experimental electronic music coming out of London and Bristol in the late 1990s. By day she studied classical harp at the Royal College of Music. By night she collaborated with her artistic collective in Shoreditch, improvising harp to electronica, mashing up classical fragments against breakbeat, house, and trip hop.
In 2006 she began working with film composer Benjamin Wallfisch — a collaboration that produced Nocturne, a piece for acoustic harp running through tape machines and reverse delay: early, instinctive spatial audio before the term existed.
The Royal College of Music awarded her a BMus (Hons) and an MMus. She gained Fellowships of Trinity College London and the Royal Schools of Music by the age of nineteen. At fourteen she was BBC Young Musician of the Year for Gloucestershire and Hereford and Worcester, and a UK semi-finalist. She has performed at St Martin-in-the-Fields, the Chichester Festival, the Cheltenham International Festival, and the Three Choirs Festival. Internationally: Japan, France, Russia, Switzerland, Spain, and the United States.
From 2004 to 2007 she served as Official Harpist to HRH The Prince of Wales — now King Charles III. During that tenure she performed at the Royal Wedding of King Charles and the Queen Consort; at the reception hosted by Her Majesty the Queen for the London 2012 Olympic Bid; at the premiere of the new Royal Golden Harp at the Llangollen International Festival; and in the first concert ever recorded in the ballroom at Buckingham Palace, broadcast by Classic FM on Christmas Day. She performed at Balmoral, Buckingham Palace, Clarence House, Kensington Palace, Windsor Castle, Highgrove, the House of Commons, and the House of Lords.
One of the most innovative harpists of her generation, Jemima’s path hasn’t always been straightforward. In 2009, after her private life became headline news, she left London and began what she describes as her reconstructive years — building a new artistic practice in the West Country, studying katana, and learning what it meant to live by the code of Bushido in a world of noise and distraction.
Between 2012 and 2015 she completed an MA in Music Therapy at the University of the West of England, discovering a hidden talent for songwriting and a flair for legacy work with the dying. She worked as a clinical music therapist at Heart of the Forest until 2018.
THE WORK NOW
In 2022 she launched the Rolls-Royce Spectre alongside the London Contemporary Orchestra at Goodwood — a full hour of original compositions written specifically for the event. The work attracted commissions from Montblanc, Adobe, HG Capital, and SVP Global. Her compositional language had arrived: hybrid cinematic. Electronic. Spatial. Deeply rooted in place and in the physical resonance of sound in space.
She is now recording her debut album. She is composing for film and media. She is developing From Stone to Sky — a permanent living sound installation that turns her 65-acre estate in the Wye Valley National Landscape into an instrument: an acoustic archive of a valley in ecological transition, documented through harp, electronics, field recordings, and spatial audio.
The estate, where she lives, is also a professional film location — 12 period sets, a 20-acre unit base, an on-site Art Department workshop, and exclusive talent accommodation within one secure perimeter. It is formally partnering with Wye Valley National Landscape as a managed biosphere. It is four minutes from Puzzlewood and twelve minutes from Tintern Abbey.
For brand, corporate, and cultural work: she is available for immersive live performance, sonic environment design, composition, and spatial audio installation. Selected clients include Rolls-Royce, Montblanc, Adobe, HG Capital, SVP Global, and the Royal Household.
INFLUENCES
Her musical reference points: Aphex Twin, Depeche Mode, Hans Zimmer, Jon Hopkins, Massive Attack, Max Richter, Metallica, Nils Frahm, Ólafur Arnalds, Halina Rice, Philip Glass, Rival Consoles. Field recording. Foley. Spitfire Audio. Heavyocity. The sound of a room before it knows it is being listened to.
Her fundamental principles are rooted in environmentalism and Japanese psychology. In Wabi Sabi — the philosophy of finding beauty in imperfection, in age, in the incomplete and the transient. In Bushido — honour, respect, courage, consistency, and the discipline to keep going when the easier path exists.
Born in Camden. Grew up with two non-verbal siblings. Learned to communicate through micro-nuance and unconventional forms before she could fully speak. That learning never left her. It is in every composition she makes — in the space between the notes, in the breath before a phrase, in the decision to let the landscape speak rather than imposing a score upon it.
She has nine pet sheep. She finds the delinquencies of the general public endlessly astonishing. Her day is made by the things that make humanity sparkle.
From Stone to Sky is her most significant ongoing project. A 65-acre estate in the Wye Valley National Landscape — a working farm in biosphere transition, a professional film location, a creative retreat, and the site of a permanent living sound installation.
The installation documents the valley’s ecological transition through an acoustic archive built season by season: the lime kilns, the stream corridor, the ancient woodland, the wildflower meadow margins, the soil beneath the permanent pasture. Harp and electronics, recorded on-site in each acoustic environment. The estate as instrument. The landscape as score.
From Stone to Sky is a Wabi Sabi estate in the Wye Valley National Landscape — a film location, a biosphere retreat, and a living sound installation, shaped by ancient stone, open sky, and one musician’s encounter with a valley in transition.
FROM STONE TO SKY
CONTACT AND ENQUIRIES
For composition, immersive performance, brand and cultural projects:
music@jemimaphillips.com · +44 7887 420157