Bunch Of Fives: Me Lost Me

Photo by Amelia Read

Me Lost Me is the electronic music project of Newcastle-based Jayne Dent, current Artist in Residence at internationally renowned concert venue Sage Gateshead. She’s a highly creative musician/artist who delights in experimenting with genre, taking influence from folk, electronica, art pop and ambient music to create something truly unique and pleasing on the ears. Today, she drops her latest single, Walking, which is taken from the forthcoming album ‘The Good Noise’, released 6th November 2020.

This latest track is an atmospheric offering with its percussive chimes and electronically textured sparseness that puts Jayne’s character-rich, Gaelic croon front and centre, as she sings of wandering aimlessly past dark city parks and houses. It’s a mesmeric offering that comes complete with an incredibly captivating music video from videographer Amelia Read, which features some wonderful dancing from Laura Lydon.

In keeping with the song, Jayne tells us about her top five inspiring walks…

When I write I tend to first think of the landscape in which a song might occur, sometimes real and sometimes imagined. These are five walks I think of often when writing music.

Mam Tor (Castleton, UK)
Mam Tor in the Peak District has frequent landslides due to its top layers of shale and gritstone. There are tarmac roads along the side of the mountain, abandoned and cracked because of its unstable ground that earned it the nickname ‘shivering mountain’. The broken up roads are an eerie, apocalyptic sight, and I’ve always kept the idea in my head that she simply doesn’t want humans building on her back, so shrugs us off without much thought every time we try. Her existence is so solidly constructed in my mind that she has become a character in many songs, as a metaphor for earth and our relationship to it.

Moesgård (Aarhus, Denmark)
Moesgård, just south of Aarhus where I lived and spent time studying for a while, is one of my favourite woodlands. It drops away suddenly to a small beach that looks out to Aarhus bay, and the water in my memory is always a beautiful, pale shade of blue. The woods form part of the grounds of Mosegård Museum, and the history contained in the huge modern architectural space spills out into the landscape around it. It’s a place I associate with a feeling of freedom, warmth, happiness and discovery. I think of it often, hazy and nostalgic like a postcard.

Antwerp City + Port (Antwerp, Belgium)
During a residency in the city it felt like I walked and biked down every street and beyond to the port as far as I could go. It was a difficult time for me and I was struggling a lot, but managed to find solace in the ritual of walking and allowing myself to get completely lost in the city, and felt cared for by the yellow light and murmur of people enjoying an unusually hot summer. My new single ‘Walking’ is set in a sort of morphed version of Antwerp and Newcastle, where I’ve found walking to be an important healing and learning experience. I now think fondly on the city and my time there, knowing how much its streets comforted me when I needed it.

Cascade d’Ars (Pyrenees Mountains, France)
Last summer when studying with Laurel Halo at CampFR, we took a walk up to Cascade d’Ars from Aulus-Les-Bains, the village where we were staying. We sat for a long time together when we reached the waterfall and it was a really magical, inspiring place, not just the view of water, trees and mountains partly shrouded in fog, but to be sharing the moment with so many wonderful artists. I remember it being an important moment of stillness and appreciation for the situation I found myself in, and a time to reflect on the relationship between landscapes, listening, walking and music. This landscape directly inspired two songs from the forthcoming album, both written during the week spent in Aulus-Les-Bains.

Kielder Skyspace (Northumberland, UK)
The walk through Kielder Forest up to James Turrell’s Skyspace, by water and through pine trees (my favourite kind of forest) is magical, and this in combination with what lies at the end of the walk makes it a really vivid place in my mind. The Skyspace is a simple, round building with a hole in the roof where you can sit and watch the sky above, a restful and meditative place with the most stunningly weird acoustic. I’ve sang in there on several occasions, and the ringing reverb is like swimming in a warm sea, it’s so addictive and inviting. The beautiful landscape outside seems different when you leave the Skyspace, it’s brighter and more intense, I imagine a feeling that could be similar to setting off home after a pilgrimage.