Inspired by folk storytelling, world-building and video games
ME LOST ME led by Newcastle-based artist Jayne Dent announces a new album RPG via Upset The Rhythm on 7th July, and has toured across the UK including support dates with Pigs x7 as well as Richard Dawson. RPG (recorded in Blank Studios with Sam Grant of Pigs x7) is ME LOST ME’s fourth outing as a collective, having transitioned from an ambitious solo project in 2017, Jayne now regularly collaborating with acclaimed North-East jazz musicians Faye MacCalman and John Pope.
ME LOST ME delights in experimenting with songwriting and storytelling, creating a beguiling mix of soaring vocals and atmospheric electronics that playfully weave together disparate genres, drawing influence from folk, art pop, noise, ambient and improvised music. Hauntological in part, RPG is concerned with tales and with time – are we running out of it? Does insomnia cause a time loop? Do the pressures of masculinity prevent progress? Jayne Dent asks these questions and more on RPG, her homage to worldbuilding and the story as an artform, calling back to those oral traditions around a campfire, as well as modern day video games – bringing folk music into the present day as she does so.
WATCH THE VIDEO FOR “EYE WITNESS” BELOW AND VIA YOUTUBE
ME LOST ME has also shared the video for “Festive Day“, from her upcoming album, RPG (due 7th July via Upset The Rhythm). Songwriter Jayne Dent comments on the track;
“Festive Day” is a song about being overcome by intense sensory experiences, of nature, the elements and desire. It’s inspired by spending a midsummer festival in Denmark, when the huge bonfires lit along the coast stayed alight through torrential rain and dense sea fog, which left a massive sensory impression on me. It’s about the coming together of all these elemental forces, feeling connected to this seasonal ritual, and connecting it to the English folk traditions around the same time of year, explored in May carols and similar songs, which often celebrate desire, lust and love alongside celebrations of nature and the land. The music video is an overload of artefacts, it’s fast paced and intense in terms of the editing but I wanted to contrast the emotional intensity of the song by framing it almost as an archive or museum of the future, that is documenting folk traditions and trying to reconstruct them and understand them, but missing that vital emotional component. I worked with folk musician and dancer Frankie Insley, who choreographed a dance in the Cotswold Morris tradition, to be featured as part of the music video, and made handkerchiefs in the Morris style featuring elemental symbols.
WATCH THE VIDEO FOR “FESTIVE DAY” BELOW VIA YOUTUBE:
Finally, Me Lost Me shares the Joshua Roland-created video for new track “Heat!“, as a final preview taken from her upcoming album RPG (7th July, Upset The Rhythm). Me Lost Me songwriter and bandleader Jayne Dent comments;
The music video for Heat! is the second one by Joshua Roland, after their amazing work on the Eye Witness video I was thrilled to be able to work with them again. Heat! is a song about the cognitive dissonance that happens when you’re out enjoying a gorgeous day, it’s hot and everyone is out enjoying themselves in the sun – but there’s this underlying feeling of unease: “it shouldn’t be this hot in March” or “it’s another record breaking heatwave this year”. Almost all of the lyrics are quite joyful, but I wanted the arrangement to have this really sinister feeling underneath, like a horror film set in broad daylight. These were the ideas I discussed with Joshua for the video, I was keen that the colours were really garish, almost painfully bright, but otherwise had no specific narrative in mind. They took the atmosphere of the song and these prompts, and made this wonderful and terrifying animation inspired by vintage Japanese monster movies, often metaphors for environmental disaster in their own right.
Joshua Roland adds;
“Really proud of how this turned out! It was a lot of fun working with the colours and camera movements to convey the sinister summer scenes that Jayne sings about, and it makes a nice complement to the strong opposing contrasts of the previous video for Eye Witness. Putting more of a sense of narrative into my work recently has been very rewarding and there’s a lot of strange contradiction in this one in that there’s a sense of grand cosmic horror, but almost as if it’s being viewed through a microscope.“
ME LOST ME presents sound reaching in opposite directions, straddling time towards the archaic and timeless traditions of folktales, and towards the possible and potential futures of pastoral Britain and the world at large. Part speculation, part reminiscence, what results on the new album RPG is music that sounds ultimately displaced and yet omnipresent, adjacent to a hapless Vonnegut hero whose life is scattered throughout time and history, but full of wonder and curiosity rather than fear.
On track “The Oldest Trees Hold The Earth”, we see time stretched out between the branches of impossibly old beings in the woods. This track was co-written in Aarhus, Denmark with fellow Newcastle folk musician (with Danish heritage) Ditte Elly. The pair wordlessly passed a sheet of paper between each other to write the lyrics, inspired by Højbjerg and Mosegård, the woods they were sitting in. “How long should I wait/Before the moss grows?/On my skin, on my outstretched arms,” the lyrics are sung in a round, the close harmonies delicate and detailed.
A central thesis of this album is the joy of creation, something which is paid homage to in the album’s final track, “Science And Art” (Not because we need it to last/just because we needed to make it – so we invented the words/this language). It is also reflected in the definition that Jayne gives for “folk” itself. She comments, “To me, folk is quite an expansive idea. I think of it as creative work that’s often made ad-hoc, with things that are at hand and more often than not it’s born of a DIY ethos. It is songs and stories of the people, as in the traditional sense, but also creative coding, game design etc. Whatever outlet someone has for their creative expression could be described as folk. It’s the things we make because humans need to make things, and the stories we tell about ourselves and the world around us.”
Crucially, on latest album RPG, Dent expands her songwriting and looks towards the unreal locations of worldbuilding in video games for inspiration. She comments, “I think the main similarity is the importance of a song’s setting/environment to inform its narrative and textures, I’m often most inspired when out walking in the natural landscape, in cities and travelling to places I’ve never been before – the environment I’m in really impacts the work I make. While writing this album, however, I found myself inspired by imaginary landscapes, those in video games, paintings, etc. I was writing stories into these unreal locations instead. Even the songs inspired by real places, like The Oldest Trees Hold the Earth, have a very surreal quality to them in the songs, like they’re being warped and turned into something not of this world. I think that’s the main difference for me in terms of the thematic content and inspiration behind this album – I’ve been getting more and more interested in balancing surreal and fantastical environmental elements with ordinary and everyday settings.”
RPG upends the concept of the eternal return – we may be in the midst of inevitable repetition, but we tell stories whilst awaiting the passage of time.
RPG TRACK LISTING:
1 – REAL WORLD
2 – EYE WITNESS
3 – FESTIVE DAY
4 – HEAT!
5 – MIRIE IT IS WHILE SUMMER I LAST
6 – THE GOD OF STUCK TIME
7 – SIDE QUEST
8 – THE OLDEST TREES HOLD THE EARTH
9 – COLLIDE
10 – IN GARDENS
11 – UNTIL MORNING
12 – SCIENCE AND ART
“Being familiar with, and a fan of Jayne’s earlier work, it was great to get the opportunity to work with her on the production of her new record. I had in mind a sense of what the record might be, but what came of the sessions, led by the vision Jayne had for the record, totally exceeded my expectations. As far as albums go, it has a breadth of writing and a sonic depth that made it a truly brilliant record. Having Jayne join us on a leg of the Pigs x7 tour in April is going to be ace. The creative nature, the sincerity and bold strokes of ME LOST ME put it in that space outside of any genre pigeonholes, and between our two sets I imagine the audience is going to have a proper sonic bath…”
Sam Grant, Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs, 2023
“The music of Me Lost Me is beguiling, idiosyncratic and cinematic – or should that be video-game-omatic? This suite of songscapes often hits the sweet spot between ancient and modern with its masterful blend of stark folk, neon electronic burbling and unusual arrangements. Jayne’s singing is refreshingly straightforward and nuanced – it’s exquisite! – and perfectly punctures the nebulae of synths and brass which billow around the old wooden frames of the songs. Whilst listening I had images in my mind of what Northumberland might look like through the eyes of Simon Stalenhag – foggy moors, a robot looking across the sea to Lindisfarne, twinkling lights on metal towers…. that sort of thing. It’s a really great album.”
Richard Dawson, 2023
A prolific writer, ME LOST ME has released two crowdfunded albums: Arcana (2018) and The Good Noise (2020), which was included in Electronic Sound Magazine’s Album of the Year list. These in addition to her latest EP The Circle Dance (2021), which was described as “her most textural and sonically adventurous music to date” by NARC Magazine, and an extensive touring schedule around the UK DIY scene, has won her unique sound much support across the musical spectrum. Dent has notably performed live for BBC Radio 3’s After Dark Festival and as part of the 2022 BBC Proms alongside Spell Songs, Royal Northern Sinfonia and the Voices of the Rivers Edge Choir. She recently received the prestigious Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Composers and was 2020-2021 Artist in Residence at Sage Gateshead.