Me Lost Me Interview: Jayne Dent Talks This Material Moment and Language

Transmission 232: Interview with Me Lost Me

Me Lost Me is the moniker of Newcastle-based artist Jayne Dent, whose work folds folk vocal traditions into a framework of electronics, performance, and conceptual composition. A graduate of fine art, Dent approaches songwriting with a toolkit borrowed from visual and sound art, drawing on mesostic poems, automatic writing, and phonetic translation.

Title: This Material Moment
Artist: Me Lost Me
Release Date: 2025-06-27
Genres: Art Rock, Avant-garde, Experimental Music, Folk, Psych-folk
Label: Upset The Rhythm
Description: Interview with Jayne Dent of Me Lost Me on her album This Material Moment, released 27 June 2025 via Upset the Rhythm.

Released on 27 June 2025 via Upset the Rhythm, This Material Moment introduces denser arrangements, with live drums and electric bass appearing for the first time, alongside contributions from Faye MacCalman, John Pope, and Ewan Mackenzie. Outside of Me Lost Me, she builds e-textile audio interfaces and collaborates across disciplines, including dance, film, and costume.

Featured image: Amelia Read

What first made you want to create music?

Oh, that’s an interesting question. I guess it was just always the thing I naturally felt like I wanted to do. I grew up around music—my parents are both music lovers and make music as their hobbies, and always have.

I got dragged along to concerts as early as I can remember, and I was just around it a lot. So it felt like the thing to do, the normal thing to do. When I started finding my own creative expression, music was the automatic go-to.

It just felt natural, I guess.

When did you start experimenting with combining voice and electronics?

I grew up around folk musicians, and there was a lot of unaccompanied singing—voice was always my main instrument, the one I felt I could play with most freely. Then I did a fine art degree and shifted focus a bit. I didn’t leave music, but I thought, “I’ll do this more visual art stuff,” which slowly turned into sound art.

I was doing field recording, playing with looping electronics, and then voice came into that through performance art. It just made sense—an organic combination.

I realised I enjoyed that strange border between art and music, voice and electronics, natural and unnatural. That was always nice.

What was the local scene like in Newcastle when you began performing? Did they support you?

Yeah. Newcastle is a really good-sized city for experimenting with genre and with the context of your work. In bigger cities, punks go to punk gigs, jazz people go to jazz gigs, rock people to rock gigs—but Newcastle is this lovely size where if you like music, you go to all the gigs.

As an art student, I was going to lots of different kinds of gigs, across genres, and meeting people who were interested in making all kinds of music. I think playful experimentation is really encouraged there, and also just getting up and doing it—people are very much like, “Do you want a gig? You can have a gig.”

It’s a very welcoming and warm space for people figuring things out. A good environment for working it out, I think.

What does the title This Material Moment mean to you?

I think it has a few layers of meaning. A lot of the language used in the lyrics is very material, object-based, tangible—wood, fabric, metal, things that exist in the world.

But then moments are so fleeting and ephemeral—they’re not tangible. A lot of the material elements are used to talk about these fleeting, ephemeral things. So it’s this combination of real-life stuff and more abstract things, marrying those together as a kind of contradiction.

That’s the kind of tension I was enjoying playing with in the lyric writing—the nonsense of something being real and not real at the same time.

What was it like working with Julia Holter on automatic writing techniques?

Yeah, so in summer 2022, I was in France at a workshop with her and a bunch of other people. I love finding new techniques for songwriting to keep myself interested—I like fun little games, I like to set myself rules. This was a really nice framework for that.

She set these rules and frameworks and introduced some lovely concepts. A few songs were written during that time, and others were written afterwards with that in mind, or with slightly modified versions of those ideas.

It was a really inspiring and beautiful time. I have this piece of paper—we gave each other feedback at the end of the workshop—and I performed the song Ancient Summer, the most recent single. She wrote a really beautiful note about it.

I can’t remember exactly what it says, but I have it pinned on my wall—her feedback on that song. It meant a lot to have feedback from someone whose work I admire so much. It was really great.

Why did you choose Towards a New Architecture as a text source for “Compromise!”?

I think my reason for choosing each of the text sources was quite playful—some of them are really throwaway on purpose. I was interested in finding different styles of writing or different types of content, abstracting the words from their original meaning. I used things like flight safety leaflets, tourist brochures, instruction manuals—taking them completely out of context.

With Towards a New Architecture, I thought it might be interesting to play around with something that talks about buildings, something with a very specific kind of language. The language used in that book has a particular tone and formality, and it felt like a good contrast.

It wasn’t a deeply thought-out choice—more like, what happens if I take a random bunch of words from something I’ve read before? And then every time I did that, I found something unexpectedly deep and meaningful in it.

So yeah, a very improvised approach.

You used mesostic poems and phonetic translations—where did those ideas come from?

Those came from the Julia Holter workshop, as provocations—ways of approaching songwriting differently. She showed us examples of people who had used them, and then we went away and tried them out.

I started with those, and then quite a few of the songs followed from that. For Compromise!, using a busier text was a similar thing—I took the idea of the mesostic poem, but instead of selecting words the way we did in the workshop, I thought, what if I put it through a random word generator? I completely removed myself from the process and let a computer decide which words I had to try and squeeze into a song.

So I took those ideas from Julia’s workshop and then riffed on them—played with them. Just curiosity, I guess.

The album uses “words as material”—are there writers or poets who influenced this approach?

I think I’ve always been drawn to work that plays with storytelling formats. The first writer I read who did this was probably Italo Calvino—he’d come up with a concept or a framework for a story, set his own rules, like “this will be a different book on every page,” that kind of thing. I like those little frameworks.

So yeah, people like him. I love words as a material—that’s probably linked to the album title too. Writers who use frameworks to write with are always inspiring.

What made you decide to use Unreal Engine to build the video environment for that track?

Because I’d never done it before. I’d wanted to play with it for a long time, and this felt like the right excuse. I like approaching things as a bit of a rookie, trying new media, and playing with things that are new to me.

I knew I didn’t want people in the video—I wanted some kind of weird built environment. I started thinking about places I could film, then thought, why not try building one instead? Unreal Engine had been on my radar for a while, so I figured this was a good chance to try it out.

It was the first thing I built using that software, and I really enjoyed it. It was very improvised—I built a bunch of spaces, recorded myself playing in that environment, and then collaged it together. So it came from both wanting to make something that wasn’t real and finally having the chance to experiment with the software.

What changed when you started working with a full band on this album? What was it like adding live drums and bass to your sound?

So me, Faye MacCalman, and John Pope have worked together on the last couple of things I’ve made—clarinet and double bass. For this album, some of the songs felt like they needed something different, like they were coming from a different place. I’d always wanted to have some live drums on a record.

Sam Grant, who produced the album, said, “Ask Ewan, of course.” Sam and Ewan are both in Pigs x7, and I’d toured with them before. It made perfect sense.

I just sent it to Ewan and said, “I can’t write for live drums. I don’t know how. I trust you—you know your instrument. I was thinking of these songs, but let me know if there’s anything else you think you could do something cool on.”

So I kind of handed that over to him. And with the electric bass too—there were a few songs where I knew I wanted double bass, but for others I thought maybe electric bass would suit better. The songs felt angrier, more intense.

They needed something electric, and they needed drums for emphasis or intensity. I kept joking during recording that a couple of the songs were my goth opera moment—I wanted them to be dramatic, big. Let’s make it big.

What other creative experiments are you curious about trying in future work?

Oh, everything. At the moment, I build e-textile audio interfaces—a sort of separate strand of work, often separate from the Me Lost Me stuff. But with this album, I’ve brought more of the visual side into it, and I think it’s heading in that direction. I’m excited about this audio-visual blurring.

I’d love to make an album where the entire thing has a visual element—start to finish, a long visual piece. I’ve worked with dancers, and I’d love to do something interdisciplinary—not just music, but dance, film. I make costumes and clothes too, so incorporating that kind of element would be great.

I love the blurring of art boundaries. And it’s just fun to collaborate with people from completely different artistic backgrounds.

Are you currently working on a new project?

I’m making a lot more… I sort of dabble—I go through these phases where I feel very music-y, then very textile-y, then very programming or computing-y. Right now, I feel like I’m in a textiles phase. I’m still writing a little bit, and I’ve got a few ideas for songs I’d like to play around with soon.

I’m starting to feel those threads of excitement again. I’m lucky that I can dabble in a lot of different things and keep myself interested and excited. I never like to force it—I let the excitement lead me.

So yeah, I’ve got some plans.

Photos courtesy of Me Lost Me

Matteo Damiani

Matteo Damiani is an Italian photographer and author. Curator of the sites Retrofuturista.com; weirditaly.com; china-underground.com and others