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. Today, she shares tour dates in support of This Material Moment, which she describes as "emotionally raw", and deems it her most honest and vulnerable album yet.

Concerned with physicality, interpretations, and, yes, materiality, This Material Moment is an album akin to rummaging through a box of long-forgotten trinkets. With each song, Me Lost Me extracts something from the box and asks 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 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 has spun 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 album 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 album 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 album was recorded by Sam Grant at Blank Studios in Newcastle, who also worked on RPG.

This Material Moment album cover

“A David Lynch-directed version of The Unthanks… overwhelmingly powerful.”
- ★★★★ MOJO

"One of her talents is identifying strong, evocative images that feel ambiguous but also somehow portentous...small images ground these drifting, elusive, probing songs, providing moments of recognition and stillness before they push off again into the mist"
- THE WIRE

 "an artist whose electrifying electronic, folk and voice experiments had already produced some of the finest sounds the North East has heard in many a year"
- NARC

 “An absorbing piece of avant-pop with forward-thinking electronic and classical elements.”
- SHINDIG

 “Me Lost Me’s Jayne Dent has deep ties, ground-in ties to traditional folk but what’s exciting about her music, and about this album in particular, is how she slips loose”
- DUSTED

 “distinctive, deeply felt music from an artist committed to discovering new ways of looking at -- and listening to -- the world.”
- ALL MUSIC

 “her most accomplished and inventive yet”
- THE QUIETUS

“an alarmingly good album, stormy and intense at one moment, wise and contemplative the next.” - KLOF MAG

“Such self-assurance feels like a step-on for ‘This Material Moment’ Me Lost Me, an album where experimentation and musicality are impressively balanced.” - 9.0/10, BACKSEAT MAFIA

“like Kate Bush’s finest moments (pick one, eh?), that benefits from being listened to, hard, from start to finish. The power of ‘Compromise!’, which is only the second track, suggests that you’ll be wanting to be buckled in for the ride here.” - MOONBUILDING

“a gentle yet intense storm of avant-garde electronics and an old, traditional folk sensibility.”
- NARC

“With one foot still immersed in her more traditional roots and the other heading off in a futuristic direction, on ‘Compromise!’ Me Lost Me again pushes the parameters of what folk music can sound like… mesmerising”
- GOD IS IN THE TV ZINE

REVISIT THE VIDEO FOR "A PAINTING OF THE WIND" BELOW
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