Jayne Dent, the artist who performs under the name Me Lost Me, is happy in the rarified air of the avant-garde. Her most recent live release was recorded at London’s experimental mecca, Cafe Oto, while her 2023 album, RPG, was a collection of electronic folk songs documenting the quest of a computer game character while speculating on the future of landscape and humanity. If that sounds like high-concept stuff, then it’s important to note that Dent has always had one foot in the present and one ear cocked for the nuances of human emotion. She is, like all the best folk singers, a storyteller and a chronicler of her time, able to weave personal experience into universal observations.
And This Material Moment is her most personal album yet. Newcastle-based Dent spent time in a writing workshop with experimental chamber-pop doyen Julia Holter, developing ideas based on automatic writing and embracing the role of chance, techniques that have their roots in surrealism, dada, and John Cage’s use of the I Ching (the lyrics of one song here, An Affirmation, read almost like ancient and divine Chinese poetry). These processes have enabled Dent to access areas of her subconscious that may previously have been obscure, and as a result, her songwriting has become both more immediate and more accomplished, with each song existing in its own undeniable present.
Opener, Useful Analogies cleverly uses metaphor to question the role of metaphor, and its relation with corporeal human existence. Musically, she serves up a hauntological platter of glitched avant-electronica, while her voice – with its noticeable North East accent – is front and centre, and often multitracked to create a formidable and cavernous vocal space. But melodies emerge too, particularly as the song draws to its close. Dent’s pop sensibilities are not to be outdone, even if they have to wait their turn.
Compromise! is – of course – entirely uncompromising, full of insistent, nagging electronics and unsettling drum patterns. Dent’s voice soars over the top, and the oblique lyrics touch on the human body and its link to the built environment. Lasting, Not to Last has an ancient feel to it, full of drones and screeches. It sounds like something that has been exhumed, and whose interests are ambivalent. Closer listening reveals a touching and powerful sense of personal melancholy. Similarly, Take it on Board might be about a fear of flying, or it might be a Bachelardian exploration of constructed space as personal topography.
One of this album’s strengths is its ability to wrong-foot the listener, to have them believe that one emotional state is prevalent when another is lurking just below the surface, ready to take over. A Painting of the Wind seems delicate and haiku-like from its outset, but there is something visceral and horny going on in there too. This song, along with Still Life and the eighties-adjacent Ancient Summer (like a darker Virginia Astley), all make use of the idea of visual art to explore the nature of reality and the relationship between art, life, and the world of dreams. Still Life makes use of field recordings of church bells and voices, and when they recede we are left with a mesmerising stillness, from which Dent’s voice and a minimal electronic pulse emerges: it’s a rich landscape, defined by its space and emptiness. The final line – ‘a pause is a gift I’d like’ – could be the key to understanding much of this album’s unique appeal.
The song that follows, A Souvenir, explores even more fully the ideas of pause and stillness. It is almost a cappella, just Dent in harmony with her backing band and some slowly encroaching background noises. And it’s utterly beautiful: a folk song for the absolute present and a paean to love. Equally beautiful is A Small Hand, Clamped, though it attains its beauty in a bleepier, glitchier way. Here physical love draws near – uncannily near – to technology.
It might seem like – with the exception of A Souvenir – Dent has moved significantly away from any notion of folk music, but this isn’t strictly the case. Across the album, there are clues that tie these songs into the tradition of making music about landscapes and the people that inhabit them. The signifiers are sonic as well as lyrical: the folky structure of the brief Vanishing Point, for example. Even the closing, Have You Been Changing? (which seems to channel Holter, Eno and perhaps a bit of Talk Talk) begins to conjure up something epically folkloric as it draws to its conclusion, pulling atavistic responses from highly contemporary ingredients. However you want to describe it, the fact remains that This Material Moment is an alarmingly good album, stormy and intense at one moment, wise and contemplative the next.
This Material Moment (June 27th, 2025) Upset The Rhythm
Order via: Bandcamp | Upset The Rhythm
Upcoming Dates
Jul 18 – Live Theatre, Newcastle Upon Tyne
Aug 2 – NightGarden, Manchester
Aug 6 – St Pancras Old Church, London
Website: https://www.melostme.com/