Screen off

A walking interview with Matt Papich and Andrew Field-Pickering of Lifted.

Not sure if this is what the name is about, but catching a set by the DMV duo Lifted involves being hoisted out of your reality and dropped into another. When I last saw them perform at the Fridge in Washington D.C. back in April, Matt Papich and Andrew Field-Pickering were working diligently in the darkness, using CDJ decks to mix field recordings of unknown provenance with various mystery-rhythms and the bass line of Hoover’s “Electrolux.” Where were we?

Now, Lifted is inviting us to the cineplex. The duo’s fantastic new album, Movie, is the kind of hyper-collage that aspires to the aural verisimilitude of a Robert Altman film, mixing daily-life iPhone recordings with studio contributions from friends: More Eaze playing pedal steel, Jeremy Hyman drumming, Mezey on synths and bass, Duncan Moore squeezing bagpipes, Motion Graphics on synths, Dustin Wong playing guitar. And while the principals of Lifted obviously know how to make dance music proper (Papich as Co La and Ecstatic Sunshine; Field-Pickering as-or-in Max D, Dolo Percussion, Beautiful Swimmers), this isn’t that. At times, Movie goes wider than any dance floor or movie screen, as if two minds are DJing multiple realities at once.

To learn more, I invited Papich and Field-Pickering on an evening walk. They’d just finished dinner at Manifest Bread in Riverdale, Maryland, so we followed the neighboring Rhode Island Avenue Trolley Trail into College Park and back. We continuously interrupted one another, but the conversation that follows has been edited for clarity with apologies to Robert Altman.

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What are your first memories of a movie sounding a certain way?

Andrew Field-Pickering: Ninja Turtles. Home Alone. Any song from a movie that we listened to in the car was on a tape that my dad recorded off the movie, VHS to cassette. With Ninja Turtles especially, we demanded he make a tape of the choicest parts. Before the last song, like the “T-U-R-T-L-E power,” my dad pressed record, so we had them whupping Shredder’s ass and high-fiving or whatever. The slang, the cowabunga shit, then the song.

Matt Papich: My dad was a Beta-head, but we made so many recordings off TV and films. You’d get the end of the commercial cutting into the start of the song.

Wow, so everything was collagey and cool right away.

Andrew Field-Pickering: The first crazy jazz thing I heard in my life was through my grandma. She had a subscription to these cassettes that came with Smithsonian magazine, and one was a Disney music compilation that has Sun Ra playing the shit from Dumbo, [“Pink Elephants on Parade”]. That’s just a tape laying around at my grandparents’ house.

Matt Papich: I think I was 13 when my dad was like, “Let me show you A Clockwork Orange.” That’s a movie that hits when you’re 13 — but the music hit, too. That reappropriation of classical music by Wendy Carlos on synths was such an unnerving part of the film. It felt so futuristic and dangerous. It was one of the first times that film music really affected me in a way that wasn’t just, like, the Spawn soundtrack.

Andrew Field-Pickering: Yo, the Judgement Night soundtrack? Batman Forever? Dude, Batman Forever has Sunny Day Real Estate and Flaming Lips and shit. The Crow soundtrack? The Rage Against the Machine song with the jazzy part? The Nine Inch Nails song on there is a Joy Division cover. We’re all 10 years old, like, “Cool.”

The Crow was definitely my first exposure to Joy Division and Suicide.

Matt Papich: The people who were doing A&R for those movie soundtracks in the ‘90s? Respect.

Which movies were you thinking about while making Movie?

Matt Papich: Altman. For years. I’m a huge Altman head. I’ve watched Nashville more than any other movie. I saw it for the first time in college and I’ve probably watched it twice a year since. It’s my go-to, mostly because of the way the sound is mixed. And because it’s a film about music, it has that conceptual tie. I like all the Altman films — Gosford Park, Short Cuts. Those are less direct in that relationship. But we’ve been talking about Altman since the beginning.

Andrew Field-Pickering: Yeah, we always talked about doing “The Altman Record” or something movie-ish. Because movie audio doesn’t move at the same speed as song audio.

Tell me more about what that means.

Andrew Field-Pickering: You know how some movies have movie logic, and other movies have comic book logic and it doesn’t work out? The pacing, the way it works. The shit you believe and won’t believe about what you see happen, or what you hear happen. Sometimes the actors suck, so the big ideas don’t go through because you don’t believe them.

So you’re trying to make music that obeys movie logic.

Matt Papich: And we’ve always liked this everyday thing about Altman, the way that Altman movies sound how being out in the world sounds. Songs have repetition and structure, and a lot of this music doesn’t. It just kind of unravels.

Andrew Field-Pickering: Movie is like if you had the screen off.

How do you go about making something like that?

Matt Papich: It came together in a not-linear way. The two tracks that are most foley-like, “Paranoids” and “Repossessed,” use stems from Co La tracks that never got used from ten years ago. So there’s a little repurposing, and this chance procedure, recording ourselves on the CDJs. We were listening really, really closely, and letting the samples play out with their own voice, whether it was a recording of people in a bar or chatter at the grocery store.

Andrew Field-Pickering: It’s like, “You have these things in your folder. I have these things in my folder. Let’s do takes and improvise.”

Matt Papich: Neither of us knew which sounds would have any similarity or communication between one another. But then something happens and there’s a magic to it. And it becomes like reality.

Andrew Field-Pickering: On old hip-hop records, when they sample movies, you know exactly what it sounds like, but with 2026 computers, the samples don’t have to sound like artifacts. No dust. We were recording shit on iPhones, recording while driving in a car in the rain, recording in a bar. It doesn’t sound vastly different from thing to thing. We can mix everything in full definition. You don’t get pulled out of it by fidelity. If we had painstakingly made Movie back in the ’80s, and it had all these different fidelities, it wouldn’t sound like a real thing happening.

Matt Papich: We’re also big Steely Dan fans, and they’ve done that: pairing the flute with a digital flute so it sounds more flute. We used to talk about that, about the merging realties of digital and analog. Now we take that for granted, and everyone does. At the beginning of Lifted, we wondered, “What could fake jazz sound like? What could a hybrid jazz sound like?” With Movie, it’s like, “How far can we go with this idea when it’s outside of songs and just sound?”

I know you guys know about Kodwo Eshun’s idea of hip-hop as the omni-genre: When you can sample every sound, everything can become music. Is that an animating idea in Lifted?

Matt Papich: Yeah, if you can collapse it all into the same world, then you have this huge game to play.

Andrew Field-Pickering: It’s because of that original omni-genre idea that we DJ this shit out.

How about intake? Are you gathering sounds for Lifted all the time?

Matt Papich: I make field recordings every day. Andrew knows whenever I’ve recorded something in my neighborhood because it has a crazy drone. “Check this one out,” and there’s this background sound of leaf-blowers from a mile away.

Andrew Field-Pickering: It might be something else, man. [Rolls his tongue while singing the lowest note imaginable]. Some X-Files shit.

Matt Papich: The song we’re hoping to start our next record with is a recording from my neighborhood that I call “The Tuscany-Canterbury Drone.” It reminds me of that scene in Twin Peaks: The Return where they’re searching for that sound in the Lodge. [Sings a much higher note like a dehydrated angel.] I think it has something to do with the heating system in the school nearby us.

When you perform live, is it important for people to know how the music is being made?

Matt Papich: I don’t like to keep things hidden. It’s all pretty simple.

Andrew Field-Pickering: I feel like anybody who DJs knows what we’re doing.

Matt Papich: But people often close their eyes when we play, and go into the headspace of the music — which I love. I don’t do that with live bands. I want to see the guitar player shred. But for us, there isn’t a lot to see, so it helps people lock into what they’re hearing.

Andrew Field-Pickering: And we can play someone else shredding. The amount of song that mixes together in front of your ears is cool. When we jam songs, that’s what I like about it.

Conceptually, having worked together for so long, have you arrived at any sense of what Lifted music ultimately means or stands for?

Matt Papich: When we started, we talked a lot about what we wanted to do, and it was pretty referential to other artists. But over time, it’s become about creating a place where you’re hearing surprises. It’s about making a situation where people can pay close attention.

How is it different from the dance music you both produce individually?

Andrew Field-Pickering: So little of dance music production is anything but intentional. You’re making tracks that go on discs that work for DJs who want to do x, y and z with your shit. Even the off-kilter choices you make are made with the club in mind.

Matt Papich: You’re designing the music so you can move your body to it. With Lifted, there’s never a purpose to the design.

Andrew Field-Pickering: These rhythms don’t happen when you produce dance music. I’ve always had sounds that I made or found — my augmented folder of nasty shit. It’s essential for all good dance music makers to have their own specialized palette-arsenal thing. But of course I find things that aren’t right for dance music. On an early Lifted song [“Rose 31”], there’s some saxophone I recorded at Union Station after coming home from some trip with that Union Station reverb. I didn’t keep that on my phone because I could mix it in with dance tracks.

So it’s like reality-capture or something.

Matt Papich: In my mind, the samples I’ve captured from reality always stay connected to where I recorded them. But when Andrew brings in samples, I’ll misunderstand them. That’s the moment I get to understand what it’s like for listeners. That shifting of what you think you know. And I like that confusion.

Andrew Field-Pickering: It’s a style-as-substance thing from movies.

Matt Papich: Yeah. So each time I listen to Movie, it’s trippy in a different way.

Because it’s something you know colliding with something you don’t know.

Matt Papich: Exactly.

Andrew Field-Pickering: Plus, we’re getting old, dude. When you make electronic music, you didn’t necessarily use your arms to play those drums. I don’t always remember exactly how I made every part of every record.

Matt Papich: That’s why with our records, we’re very careful about the credits, and making sure we’re clear about our contributors and who played what.

What about one another? What is it about working together as individuals that makes Lifted work?

Andrew Field-Pickering: One of the dudes who recorded one of the first Lifted things was like, “You guys don’t ever argue about what happens on your records.”

Matt Papich: We’ve been doing this for so long and it’s been so chill for the entire time.

Andrew Field-Pickering: There aren’t any power-grab elements to Lifted music. “I demand we have the sound of you ordering a chicken sandwich on this motherfucker!” It’s not really like that.

Matt Papich: There isn’t any preciousness to the parts we add, but we care about the parts other people add. I’ll do more work to make someone else’s take make sense than I’d ever do for my own. I think Andrew and I are both really happy to throw out our ideas because we know they’ll be replaced with more ideas.

Is that the Kodwo Eshun thing again? If your palette is the whole of existence, there’s always more world to bring in?

Andrew Field-Pickering: Yeah. And we have all the time in the world. Or at least as much as humans do. You wait for the pretty-cool thing to happen, you snatch it, and you can use it. With a movie, it’s like, “Why is that shot the one you kept?” Or, “Why does it cut to the next scene there?” We just do that for sound.

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Lifted’s Movie is out on the Outside Time label tomorrow, June 5. Lifted will perform with More Eaze and Earthen Sea at Tonal Park in Takoma Park, Maryland on June 6 at 7 p.m.