Electronic folk innovator and recent Paul Hamlyn Foundation award winner Me Lost Me unveils her new EP The Circle Dance.

On her haunting new five-track EP, The Circle Dance, Newcastle-based Me Lost Me aka Jayne Dent melds synthesizers with double bass and woodwind to imagine a future-facing vision of a planet built on balance and harmony. “One where we’ve actually managed to sort things out,” she says.
The EP’s title track conjures a folkloric scene, splicing thematic lyrics (“a circle motion maintaining balance / never too much / nor not enough”) with droning synths, scratchy strings and the rolling waves of Durham’s striking, otherworldly Blast Beach; a former coal mine dumping ground that formed the opening scenes for Alien 3 and provided a cache of field recordings for The Circle Dance.
“I was imagining a folk tradition that could have existed for a very long time, but also one that could still exist in the future,” explains the Chesterfield-raised artist of the self-produced EP’s opening track. “The Circle Dance,” which creates a foreboding air of folk horror dissonance, embraces the spring equinox, the summer solstice, seasonal folk festivals and “folk rituals about demons getting banished”.
The Circle Dance, which follows 2020’s celebrated LP The Good Noise, features instrumentation from Newcastle jazz stalwarts John Pope (double bass) and Faye MacCalman (clarinet), while being firmly rooted in Dent’s folkie upbringing; her dad plays both the hurdy-gurdy and the concertina and her parents introduced her to folk from an early age. She discovered electronic music as an art student via the experimental route, citing sonic visionaries like Pauline Oliveros and Laurie Anderson as sources of inspiration. Dent channels her love of these artists into the EP, where a palette of electronic production and analog synths help her transcend the boundaries of traditional folk.
Dent unpacks her utopic manifesto across the EP’s five varied tracks. Electroacoustic reverie “Acrobat on the Roof” champions the community-led aspect of her imagined world, where mundane yet essential tasks like “fixing broken tiles” and collective working comprise the song’s content. On “Sing to the Sun,” she wakes up in a cooperative city by the sea where people “share what they know without fear.” Glistening with field recordings from Whitley Bay, Dent pours her treasured walks on the beach into this delicate seaside hymnal.
The Circle Dance is an exploration of the local; every song on the EP channels a specific place in either the northeast or Fife, while “ the “nurturing” and “welcoming” spirit of the Newcastle music scene continues to offer support. “Three Crossings” was created during a writing residency in Fife, Scotland and interprets the city’s famous three bridges as a kind of musical score, where all the sounds in the songs directly respond to the safety lights on the bridges. “I like the idea of thinking about the three ways of getting across the river as a metaphor for choosing paths into the future,” she says.
The supple electronica of “Binoculars,” which was also created in Fife, closes the EP with field recordings of birds captured during an artist residency at the Sage Gateshead while the track also weaves in a sprinkling of bird-like clarinet. “I was trying to write about a future when you can’t see how to get there; in the same way as looking through binoculars brings something really close to you. It magnifies an image but you can’t see how to get there because it’s just a really tiny section of what’s in front of you. I saw that as a metaphor for trying to look into the future and why it’s so hard to write music about it.”