FOLK
BY JIM WIRTH
Me Lost Me
★★★★
RPG
UPSET THE RHYTHM. CD/DL/LP
Modern rubbish is life: uncanny North-east collective’s folk 2.0.
“Not because we need it to last, just because we needed to make it,” sings Newcastle-based auteur Jayne Dent, giving her take on divine human endeavour on Science And Art, the closer to her fourth sci-fi voyage as Me Lost Me. If old-school folk celebrates the mad accident of the songs and scraps that escaped the trash compacter of history, RPG (translation for Luddites: ‘Role-Playing Game’) refocuses that sense of wonder toward the endless changing jumble of 21st century creativity. A glitching, AI take on The Unthanks, it melds trad techniques and Minecraft burble into “a massive, multi-player online dream”, as Dent puts it on The God Of Stuck Time. Stylistic touchstones veer from the Watersons, Grandaddy and Richard Dawson out toward the William Blake’s 7 weird of Julia Holter, Henry Cow and Julie Tippetts’ prog-jazz outlier