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 fourth full-length, This Material Moment – arriving on Upset the Rhythm on 27th June – she has created an “emotionally raw” album, her most honest and vulnerable 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.
With the album announcement today, Me Lost Me shares the single/video for “Compromise!”
“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.”
“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.”
THIS MATERIAL MOMENT TRACK LISTING:
1 – USEFUL ANALOGIES
2 – COMPROMISE! [video]
3 – LASTING, NOT TO LAST
4 – A PAINTING OF THE WIND
5 – STILL LIFE
6 – A SOUVENIR
7 – ANCIENT SUMMER
8 – TAKE IT ON BOARD
9 – A SMALL HAND, CLAMPED
10 – AN AFFIRMATION
11 – VANISHING POINT
12 – HAVE YOU BEEN CHANGING?