{"id":523645,"date":"2026-06-29T05:15:15","date_gmt":"2026-06-29T05:15:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/523645\/"},"modified":"2026-06-29T05:15:15","modified_gmt":"2026-06-29T05:15:15","slug":"lifted-movie-album-review-pitchfork","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/523645\/","title":{"rendered":"Lifted: Movie Album Review | Pitchfork"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lifted<\/a>\u2019s recordings chase the feeling of being a \u201cfly on the wall<\/a>,\u201d 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<\/a> and Matt Papich<\/a> invite a rotating cast of instrumentalists to unspool their ideas and discover the results\u2014sometimes finding loping grooves, often fanning out into roaming ambience that they further process with computers and CDJs. You\u2019re 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\u2019s digital wayfinding structures the music, organizes the personnel, and charts new paths for them all to travel together. It\u2019s a challenging proposition that requires the right mix of focus and spontaneity to nail the mellow atmosphere they\u2019re after.<\/p>\n

The musicians and their D.C.-area peers have released<\/a> work<\/a> across<\/a> a sprawling array of projects. But they\u2019re 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<\/a> and Vladislav Delay<\/a>) or the magic of a communal jam (last year, Field-Pickering put out an excellent cassette<\/a> that highlighted D.C.\u2019s 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\u2019s other work, but no less involved. Each half of the duo is armed with a pair of CDJs loaded with instrumental stems and sonic \u201cfound footage\u201d; alongside their supporting players, they document the amorphous, interstitial zone where all their fascinations bleed together.<\/p>\n

No score yet, be the first to add.<\/p>\n

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\u2019d hear on PBS. \u201cMelts Very Nasty\u201d builds an all-encompassing drone out of Dustin Moore\u2019s bagpipes and a bunch of jog-wheel and filter manipulations; \u201cOther Delights\u201d 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\u2014a dryly sung portion at the end of \u201cRepossessed\u201d that seems to be an imaginary country song about a repo man taking back stereo equipment.<\/p>\n

Listening to Movie, the most prominent visual impression you\u2019re left with isn\u2019t 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<\/a> 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\u2019s 3 bookend the album to show how Lifted\u2019s panoramic approach can expand an ensemble\u2019s range of motion. more eaze<\/a> shines on \u201cThe Ice Chewers\u201d; her rickety pedal steel (which, with an array of input mechanics to affect its woozy, jog wheel\u2013esque 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\u2019s record. Even on a lengthy, abstract lounge-jazz head trip like \u201cParanoids,\u201d the interplay feels grounded.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Lifted\u2019s recordings chase the feeling of being a \u201cfly on the wall,\u201d of witnessing a musical moment emerge…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":523646,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[692,93,61,60,270,514],"class_list":["post-523645","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-albums","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-movies","tag-web"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/523645","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=523645"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/523645\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/523646"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=523645"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=523645"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=523645"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}