Mute Branches
Hits that wonderful spot that Broadcast's later work hits in terms of seamlessly bringing together folkloric earthiness with inventive electronics, while sounding very much its own thing. Can't wait for the full-length album!
Favorite track: Binoculars.
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Limited Edition Cassette Tape
Cassette + Digital Album
100 limited run of cassette tapes. Side A consists of tracks 1-5 of the Circle Dance EP, Side B is a collage of the full field recordings featured throughout the EP. Lino prints feature on outer side of fold out booklet, with AI generated images based on dataset of photographs by Amelia Read feature on the inside.
Includes unlimited streaming of The Circle Dance EP
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
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.”
credits
released October 1, 2021
Written + Produced by Jayne Dent
Clarinet by Faye MacCalman
Double Bass by John Pope
Mastered by Harbourmaster
Project supported by Arts Council England, Help Musicians UK and Sage Gateshead.
For all press enquiries please contact Luke Twyman on luke@onebeatpr.com
supported by 23 fans who also own “The Circle Dance EP”
This is very close to what I heard/felt everytime we visited the grandparents in Runcorn.
Ominous dread. Bleak dystopia. Concrete and terraced houses. Plus the air smells! MonkeyMajiks
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supported by 23 fans who also own “The Circle Dance EP”
Great record. wears it's influences proudly ..but retains a sliver of identity that is uniquely British and has a northern feel to it..I think that these geographic musical vignettes are realy evocotive of northern Newtown Uber estates and satellite communities..I hope this translates to a wider audience for him...he deserves the attention. give him his due .NOW . christopherogley