Me Lost Me, the project of Newcastle-based artist Jayne Dent, delights in experimenting with songwriting, creating a beguiling mix of soaring vocals and atmospheric electronics that playfully push the boundaries of genre. On Me Lost Me’s upcoming fourth record, This Material Moment, she has created an “emotionally raw” record, her most honest and vulnerable yet. Concerned with physicality, interpretations, and, yes, materiality, This Material Moment is an offering akin to rummaging through a box of long-forgotten trinkets, each song extracting something from the box and asking us to consider it from every angle. “This is an album which uses words as a material, a playful tool for experimentation, full of metaphor, abstraction and analogies.” Jayne says, “it has softness and anger, humour, hope and despair, intensity of feeling in all directions expressed as textures, objects, places.”
With the album announcement today, Me Lost Me also shares the video for the record’s first single, “Compromise!”, which you can watch and listen to below this article. On the single, Me Lost Me comments, “This song began as a challenge to myself – to improvise lyrics around a random collection of words, which I gathered by putting the entire text of Le Corbusier’s Towards a New Architecture through a random word selector, pulling out prompts. The idea was that these words would give me new ways of expressing emotions, new metaphors to build on, and vocabulary that I wouldn’t normally use. Through the process of improvising and free writing around these few words, I ended up creating what feels like to me to be a very raw, emotional and personal song, which took me by surprise when I listened back to what I’d made. To me, it is about hetronormative and capitalist expectations and definitions of success, how they can limit us and take us away from passions and joys and the things that make us human. It is about the fear of being trapped in that cycle of performing a life, rather than living a life, about architecture, comfort, safety, domesticity, wildness and freedom. It’s about compromising and its consequences, both good and bad. I made the music video by collaging clips of an environment built in Unreal Engine. I wanted to explore the concepts in the lyrics further in a visual way, particularly the idea of being trapped in the repetitive cycles of performing a life based on expectations. It is framed like a video game, with lives slowly being diminished and a character (the head of a statue of the Greek God Apollo) exploring an exploded, wonky architecture that is part art gallery, part church, part dreamscape. They come across versions of themself repeated and reflected, other statues from various mythologies and the detritus of a building site, step ladders, paint buckets, tools, broken walls.”
With the release of This Material Moment, Me Lost Me puts into practice the automatic writing techniques she developed during a workshop with Julia Holter, and in the process, spuns her music in different directions that draws on poetry, psalms and using mesostic poems and phonetic translations to generate words. “Despite the chance-based writing strategies throughout, it feels like the most emotionally raw album I’ve ever made,” she says, likening the process to a Rorschah test which revealed things to her she wasn’t expecting to express. “I wanted to hide in stories, but I saw things plainly when I tried to write”. Having finished the writing process, Jayne realised that she had an unexpectedly personal record on her hands, into which her feelings of burnout and overwhelm had crept unconsciously. “Several of the songs for me express a kind of inner conflict, where you’re trying to keep hope and desire and beauty and art near to your heart, to live a meaningful life, but finding that increasingly hard to hold onto in a world that’s so fucked up.”
Whilst Jayne Dent’s music as Me Lost Me has previously presented time stretching back and forwards in opposition (noticeably on 2023’s RPG), on This Material Moment she does away with linearity altogether, evoking rather than narrating, and presenting feelings, happenings and moods with no clear beginning or end point – “like experiencing a vista, trying to capture a moment that is unfolding all at once”. Instead, each track on This Material Moment exists entirely in media res, adjacent to past and future, and instead sprawling across the endless now. This Material Moment was written and arranged solo, but played with a core band of John Pope on electric/double bass, Faye MacCalman on clarinet, and now with the addition of Ewan Mackenzie (Dextro/Pigs x7) on drums – bringing in live drums and electric bass for the first time. The record was recorded by Sam Grant at Blank Studios in Newcastle, who also worked on RPG.
This Material Moment will be released on June 27th via Upset The Rhythm. Pre-orders are now available here.
Photo credit: Amelia Read
