Sometimes things that don’t make sense actually make perfect sense. Ever hear a movie? Or watch a soundtrack? There’s an implausibility and disconnect there that still, somehow, is engaging and transgressive. Lifted, the duo of Andrew Field-Pickering and Matt Papich, distill that into their newest record, Movie. Six tracks where Foley bleeds into melody, and where CDJ improvisations become narrative circuitry stitched together into something that moves and breathes. Disparate, shifting parts held together by elastic sonic tendrils that build scenes as much as they build songs. Movie blurs different mediums into one strange, living document.
Movie is OUT NOW on Outside Time.
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What are your earliest memories of sound and music? Were there particular moments or recordings that first made you aware of listening as something you were actively doing?
Andrew Field-Pickering: I remember really liking “Whip It” by Devo and “Heard It Through The Grapevine” by Marvin Gaye as my two first like, fav songs. Just jamming in the car with my family. My earliest sound memory is probably being outside at the house I grew up in, which was way back in some woods. I would always get so psyched if I knew my grandma or friends were coming over and I heard the far-off sound of someone driving up the driveway.
Matt Papich: The first song I really, really liked was “Kokomo” by the Beach Boys – it was on the radio all the time. I remember waiting for it to come on the radio, anticipating it; I don’t think we owned a copy or anything. After that, I think about getting a Walkman and just feeling so like ‘modern life’ by being able to take the music with me into the world. That’s when I really started liking music, and buying music. Being able to have my own tunes in headphones in the backseat of the family car, that was a revolution for me.
And when did music become something you wanted to play/make? Were there early experiences that kind of inspired you into action? Basically, how did each of you arrive at the kind of work you make now?
AFP: I come from a pretty musical family, and I remember I dabbled with playing the trombone, sort of in the normal elementary school time when you can take an instrument class if you want to. I didn’t like it, and I remember when I officially sort of “quit” the trombone, my family was a little disappointed. But then a couple of years later I got my grandfather’s drum set, and it was pretty on and poppin’ once that was in the house. Luckily, my dad had a coworker who was a drummer, and he gave me lessons. That sort of collided with me getting into punk and hardcore, and I played my first show, was extremely hooked after that. Around then I got hooked on all things records too, like the liner notes, how things were made, studios, etc. I dreamed of being in one for weeks and shit. Arriving at the music work I make these days was sort of way roundabout, through a couple decades of rap music/dance music production, and then wanting to fold the rest of my interests in, but it has sort of come all the way back around, and I play drums on a few Lifted songs, which is extremely satisfying.
MP: There was always music around me growing up – this was the era of 5-disc changers and Bose speakers in the family room and patio, but making music wasn’t something I thought about much until later, like teenage years. The local hardcore and punk scene was pretty strong in Lancaster (and just like southeastern PA in general) in the late 90s, and it was the local bands that kind of opened me up to the idea of playing music myself. Initially, I organized shows before playing in bands, putting on all-ages things at like VFWs. I remember calling bands on the phone; they would have contact info in the 7” or something, and realizing then that these were pretty regular guys, approachable – that I could maybe do what they were doing.
So let’s get to the main reason we’re here. Y’all have this incredible new record out, Movie, and it’s such a specific kind of listening experience. How did the film-as-blueprint idea first come into focus for this record?
AFP: We’d kicked the idea around for years of making music that had more of a subtle Film aspect to it. Like we never wanted to make an actual movie, but we wanted to put audio together as scenes, and go for that sort of special feeling of movie audio logic, that isn’t the same as what songs are. We called it “the Altman thing” for years, until we had a couple things cooking that ended up feeling right for that type of album. At the same time, we got into using CDJ setups to perform album tracks, so that the two of us could take the heavily studio-reliant songs, with many parts from many people, and perform them live, by manipulating the stem tracks. Through those CDJ setups, we finally got into making album tracks live in the studio, just collecting a bunch of sounds and improvising takes to see how everything fit. That live editing-table type approach comes out very cinematic; it takes songs a little, but not all the way, out of their natural element and gets the logic of other art forms to start flowing through it.
MP: Like Andrew said, we’d been talking about the music and film idea for a while now, like going back to 2019-2020. As we started making some of the tracks that would wind up on LP 3 and the 3.3, 3.2, 3.1 EPs, we really began using field recordings more and also recordings I would make while watching TV, recorded in the room, not direct. Songs like Chefs from 3 came around like that. As we worked on them, it was less about adding musical elements, and more about building a scene. We basically followed that logic further with the stuff that wound up on Movie.
The Altman and Weerasethakul references feel really precise. That quality of sound establishing place and personality rather than just background texture – that resonates with me deeply. Were those touchstones present from the beginning, or did they surface as a way of describing this work as it started happening?
AFP: Like I was saying above, we nicknamed the Movie impetus “the Altman thing” or “the Altman record,” as we are just heavily influenced by how his movies always sound. You can sort of choose what you pay attention to, and you can go on your own tangents as a viewer. Weerasethakul we just both love; the audio in his movies and film art through the years just has this perfect, subtle thing going on. We also love classic tweaked film audio worlds like David Lynch. We really love TV themes and kind of callback to our teen viewing years. We were recently texting a lot about covering the Daria theme and other 90s/00s touchstones like that. Matt, way more than me, is also an avid reality TV show experiencer, and there’s a lot of tweaked audio inspiration there that flecks into our stuff too.
MP: Yeah, I mean Altman has just been a touchstone for me for years – I first saw Nashville in college in a class on a classic A/V cart setup – on like a CRT, probably played off a VHS from the library. It was such a blurry, gauzy way to watch that movie, and I think that experience has stuck with me. I’ve watched Nashville many, many times. I watch Weerasethakul films only at certain times of year, when the weather is nice enough to not need any A/C or fans, or have the heating system on because they’ll drown out the best parts of his movies. They are so subtle, and I need to really hear the ambient sounds that define them. I also just love the ambience of a television that’s been left on; it’s comforting and luxurious to me. Part of Movie is trying to create that kind of experience for the listeners.
The core of the album came out of spontaneous CDJ improvisation sessions (yes!). Can you describe what those sessions actually look like? How much direction is there going in?
AFP: Nowadays we pretty much craft whole songs improvising on the CDJs. We each basically collect and play for each other blocks of sounds, melodies, Foley, long chords, and then we just see where we can place them in a row to have a song start moving. We’ll also pre-record vocals and snippets of talking, and see how the meaning shakes out once we start playing. We don’t use many samples of movies or audio at all; it’s all just various fidelities of us and our worlds.
MP: We went into it the CDJ thing kinda knowing it would be cool, but not expecting it to be such a fruitful method for us to fold into our production. The actual setup is simple: we both have 2 CDJs (so 4 total), and we each have a Pioneer mixer (so two mixers). It’s essentially a mirrored setup.
How much of what ended up on the record is pure first-take instinct versus something that got shaped and sculpted afterward?
AFP: There’s always a little shaping and sculpting after the first-take, but some of the Movie tracks came out as 97% finished; it was like the hypothesis we had for this way of making tracks did just come together well, like we thought it would. We sort of know better at this point in Lifted than to overcook something. We do a lot of finishing albums in mastering even, rather than tinkering the final mixdowns infinitely.
MP: It’s a bit of all our production methods. Tracks like Midnight Snack are basically recorded, overdubbed, and mixed in a traditional way. Paranoids and Repossess came about more or less as you hear them from our first ever CDJ session, recorded by Mezey in his studio. We talk while we play and record, and we were both surprised by how good things were sounding off the bat, so we’d be like ‘keep that loop going’ or like ‘let this part play out, and I’ll bring in the bassline’.
Bringing in collaborators like more eaze, Duncan Moore, and Dustin Wong (gosh what a line-up)… How did those relationships find their way into the record? Did you know where each person would fit, or did that emerge more organically?
AFP: Movie has a special sort of “editing floor/editing desk” type thing to it, so some sounds had already happened, like we did a session of bagpipes and drones with Duncan, and knew we were going to jam songs based off of those, or incorporate them into future stuff later. The song with more eaze was me kind of feeling like this drum thing I recorded could totally use pedal steel and other sort of TV/guitar signifiers, and I thought of Mari real quick for that. We sort of got it ready for broadcast after Mari sent back amazing stuff. Dustin and Matt had been in bands together a while ago, and we’ve had a couple great sessions with him, like when he’s back in town type. Dustin is such a guitar genius. He takes the sessions we do into such special places.
MP: This is definitely more of an organic record. It came together from a few years of recordings – not like a single session. The drums and Dustin’s guitar in Midnight Snack were recorded back when we recorded a few things that wound up on Trellis, maybe in like 2023. It was mixed and just didn’t sit nicely on Trellis, but found such a perfect spot here. We do a lot of sessions not knowing what the recording will be used for. Keeping things open like that gives us a lot of freedom in the moment, and later a lot of variety of ideas to work with.
The part in the album description that talks about this lack of a mandate to make something overtly musical meant certain techniques got foregrounded here that have always been part of the arsenal. Did that freedom feel different in practice? Did it change how you approached making these pieces?
AFP: All the Lifted records have paid special attention to the sort of “scene-switching” feel that comes with sequencing a full-length, so we were always incorporating parts of what ended up being Movie’s main thing into the ends of songs, or abrupt transitions between tracks, or how the last song gotta be The Last Song, you know?
MP: Some of the most cinema/movie feeling parts of the record (Paranoids and Repossess) are built from stems from Co La tracks that didn’t make it onto No No, which came in in like 2016. Those old demos share a quality of what you get on Movie, but they were definitely designed as songs. So with those we kind of literally applied a new method to something that we already had, and because it worked so well we started trying that method in other places where it seemed appropriate.
Foley artistry is such an interesting and awesome touchstone for a music record. How did that whole world enter y’all’s thinking with Movie, and what does it offer that purely musical approaches don’t?
MP: I’ve been personally interested in Foley in relation to music for a while now, and I really explored that heavily on the Co La records No No and Sensory Dub Example. For a ‘music video’ for No No, I made Shrink (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVx2b5P_DJw) with the help of the hyper-talented Andrew Strasser. For Shrink, we used stems from the Co La record as the Foley sounds, and created a narrative to flesh out the themes of paranoia, anxiety, and fracturing that the record was conceptually centered around. But really all the Co La stuff was in some way thinking about scene and mood, and Foley as a part of that. Field recordings are really important to me. I used to have a Sony PCM-D50, which captured beautiful, detailed recordings. Now I tend to just record on my phone, which is fine to my ears and for our use. I record sounds most days, not just out in the world but also from TV, or like music people are playing from their cars, or just different ambient industrial sounds from like HVAC systems.
What surprised you the most in making Movie? (or even surprised you most about the end result)
AFP: I wasn’t surprised per se, but im very satisfied with how well everything worked, in the way we thought it would work. This album even more than others was one of those things where, even though it sounds nothing exactly like what we had in mind when we started it, it came out sounding exactly like what we had in our heads.
MP: I really love how this record doesn’t stay static for me on repeat listens. I don’t follow the same leads over again or imagine the same things or places. That surprised me.
What does the relationship between your work as Lifted and your individual projects look like now? Do they feed each other, or do you keep them fairly separate?
AFP: These days I sort of feel like there’s a main “me” that is the player in a few collaborative groups. I obviously do solo stuff too, but I sort of feel mostly like one part of a few different musical things. I just feel like a player.
MP: I don’t do a lot of solo work these days besides sometimes creating demos for stuff like Lifted. Besides this project, I work pretty often with Mezey on the Mezey & Nosho stuff, which scratches a different itch. I don’t miss working solo, but I feel like it was important to do for me at the time.
And, as always to close… What are some of your favorite sounds in the world?
AFP: I got to record one of my favorite sounds in the world this past February, when we had this wild ice storm that lasted for weeks. I would pick up huge chunks of ice, and record them breaking elsewhere on the ice, and then the shards of ice would all slide around the ice too, creating a very unique, like, tail of the sound, almost like a living reverb delay thing. It also kind of sizzled even though it’s ice. It’s a very wild sound; I’ve been using some for snares.
MP: Crowded bar with a cocktail being shaken, mourning doves, rattling sounds from bass pressure vibrating things, Bic lighter sound.
Foxy Digitalis depends on our awesome readers to keep things rolling. Pledge your support today via our Patreon or subscribe to The Jewel Garden. You can also make a one-time donation via Ko-fi.
