Lifted’s recordings chase the feeling of being a “fly on the wall,” of witnessing a musical moment emerge as if you were right there in the studio with them. The many-aliased duo of Andrew Field-Pickering and Matt Papich invite a rotating cast of instrumentalists to unspool their ideas and discover the results—sometimes finding loping grooves, often fanning out into roaming ambience that they further process with computers and CDJs. You’re asked to devote attention to a few layers of abstraction at once: The analog improvisers are finding common ground in the room, while the duo’s digital wayfinding structures the music, organizes the personnel, and charts new paths for them all to travel together. It’s a challenging proposition that requires the right mix of focus and spontaneity to nail the mellow atmosphere they’re after.
The musicians and their D.C.-area peers have released work across a sprawling array of projects. But they’re always trying to conjure those fly-on-the-wall moments, whether achieved through studio technique (like many acts today, Lifted look back fondly on ambient dub from early Chain Reaction and Vladislav Delay) or the magic of a communal jam (last year, Field-Pickering put out an excellent cassette that highlighted D.C.’s go-go funk tradition, in which live-session bootlegs are prized over official releases). Movie, titled for its cinematic pacing, is less song-oriented than some of Lifted’s other work, but no less involved. Each half of the duo is armed with a pair of CDJs loaded with instrumental stems and sonic “found footage”; alongside their supporting players, they document the amorphous, interstitial zone where all their fascinations bleed together.
Movie hinges on its four-track midsection, a series of extended pieces that focus on the indeterminate space between field recordings and the studio. Washed-out dialogue and fleeting snatches of environmental storytelling are situated among stretches of instrumental ambience, which might bring to mind ECM or the incidental jazz you’d hear on PBS. “Melts Very Nasty” builds an all-encompassing drone out of Dustin Moore’s bagpipes and a bunch of jog-wheel and filter manipulations; “Other Delights” reprises those bagpipes, then migrates through enclosed dub corridors, along the walls of blurry dining rooms, and out into a rainy vista. The extensive Foley sound work creates an open-ended space, and Lifted are earnest in their invocation of filmmakers like Robert Altman and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, though Movie cares more about surface coherence than deep characterization. One vignette stands out for particularly inspired world-building, however—a dryly sung portion at the end of “Repossessed” that seems to be an imaginary country song about a repo man taking back stereo equipment.
Listening to Movie, the most prominent visual impression you’re left with isn’t any precisely blocked scene, but Field-Pickering and Papich themselves. You imagine them fiddling with their CDJs and modules, figuring out the boundaries of their shared collage, provoking the stereo field with effects knobs to calibrate immersion as they go. In comparison to field recordists like Vanessa Rossetto who craft diaristic worlds from their scattered source material, Movie focuses on the way the dreamlike orchestration of sonic space gives rise to new interactions between players. Beat-driven jams similar to the highlights of 2022’s 3 bookend the album to show how Lifted’s panoramic approach can expand an ensemble’s range of motion. more eaze shines on “The Ice Chewers”; her rickety pedal steel (which, with an array of input mechanics to affect its woozy, jog wheel–esque timbres, is perhaps the analog instrument closest in spirit to the DJ controller) leaves behind bitcrushed flecks of melody as her guitar-and-bass groove tries to steady itself within the space. Ultimately, this is a pretty workmanlike improviser’s record. Even on a lengthy, abstract lounge-jazz head trip like “Paranoids,” the interplay feels grounded.
A good DJ set, like a well-edited film, relies on the projection of competence. With the right presentation and technique, you can make any choice come off as natural, because the role engenders trust in the narrative logic of your sequencing. Lifted’s discography combines the subdued harmonic intuition of a certain genre-fluid streak of contemporary jazz with the self-justifying power of the locked-in DJ, and arrives at a form of improvised music that’s both transcendent and approachable. Movie is almost pure method, with fewer crowd-pleasing gestures and a murkier textural range than the other Lifted records. But you know they’ve learned all the material inside and out, and you can trust wherever they take you.
