Trellis

DMV-area collective Lifted have been cruising at altitude since 2015, a sleek if idiosyncratic spacecraft piloted by Future Times co-founder Andrew Field-Pickering (a.k.a. Max D, Maxmillion Dunbar, Dolo Percussion) and Matt Papich (Co La, formerly of Ecstatic Sunshine) with ample room on board for fellow travelers like Dawit Eklund, Beatrice Dillon, and Jonny Nash. Their M.O. is right there in the name, an arrow tilted toward higher consciousness and higher planes: This is head music for spiritual beings and celestial bodies. Across three LPs and a smattering of EPs, they’ve floated a sui generis mixture of drifting ambient, driving funk, and buoyant electronic improv that’s not quite jazz, but also not not jazz. Call it jazz by another means, in which Ableton, MPCs, and CDJs are as integral to the improvisational sprawl as old-school chops and changes.

Their name also might speak to the way that friends raise each other up, because Lifted are collaborative to the core. Trellis, their fourth album, stems from an extended 2022 session at Baltimore’s Temple House studios, improvising with guitarist Dustin Wong, drummer Jeremy Hyman, and multi-instrumentalist Benjamin Boeldt (aka Mezey, fka Adventure); the credits speak to the core duo’s open-door policy. Longtime pal Motion Graphics turns up playing piano on a song actually called “Open Door”; Earthen Sea (a.k.a. ex-Black Eyes/Mi Ami member Jacob Long) plays sax and percussion on “Warmer Cooler” and “The Latecomer”; Juju & Jordash’s Jordan GCZ lays down understated Rhodes chords on “All Right,” alongside an incandescent electric guitar lead from indie lifer Tim Kinsella (Joan of Arc, Cap’n Jazz). But rarely do those contributions stand out; this wouldn’t be a Lifted album if all the parts weren’t seamlessly melded—sometimes practically melted—into a porous psychedelic whole.

Take “All Right,” which opens the album. A feathery loop of Wong’s guitar bubbles across the stereo field like an aquarium-themed screensaver. Field-Pickering sits behind the drum kit, evoking whitewater currents with eddies of cymbal taps and snare rolls. Kinsella’s guitar and Jordan GCZ’s Rhodes round out the stormy vibe, the latter the silver lining to the former’s thunderheads. Somewhere in there, a whole bunch of other stuff is going on: detuned doorbells, rainstick rustling, murmuring voices. Despite the muscular rush of the drums, it feels almost like ambient music.

Some of this stuff gets really abstract, particularly in the album’s stoney middle stretch. “Warmer Cooler” is a slow-motion swirl of fizzing white noise and splashes of synth that Papich and Field-Pickering constructed in part on CDJs, blurring the line between field recordings, improv, and turntablism. The hazy ambient dub of “Pasters” cedes the foreground to dissonant guitar and damaged spring reverb; never in any hurry to get anywhere fast, it dissolves into pure noise by the end. “The Latecomer” is equally directionless, but this time gently so; its tufts of synth and saxophone recall the nebulously sensual moods of Jon Hassell at his most atmospheric.

Lifted have never been terribly concerned with structure. “In Lifted there is no strict control,” Field-Pickering has said. “I think a lot of Lifted songs do tend to make a path of their own in a way. We all have lives, pursuits, other things going on, and the amount of time between versions of tunes makes it so that our sense of editing sort of melts down.” But Trellis also features some of the most streamlined, song-like writing on any Lifted album to date. Wong channels the Durutti Column’s Vini Reilly on the fetching “Gris Pink”; “Specials,” sculpted around a gorgeous bass-synth melody from Papich, has a low-key sentimentality that reminds me of Arthur Russell, even if it doesn’t exactly sound like him. (Maybe it’s the delicate balance of simplicity and complexity: It begs you to sing along, yet challenges you to keep up with its unexpected twists and turns.)

No track better encapsulates this newfound lyrical side of Lifted than “Open Door,” a languid ambient-jazz miniature made with little more than a wistful circular piano melody and daubs of what sound like clarinet, but the credits say are Wurlitzer. As the song progresses, the piano begins slipping out of tune, submitted to the vagaries of warped tape—subtle at first, then so severe that you imagine a battered Maxell spilling in an iridescent tangle from the dashboard cassette deck. The plaintive warble only enhances the song’s fragility. Then, just as it’s all about to drown in dissonance, a dubby hip-hop beat swoops in on a rescue mission, carrying the track to higher ground. It’s clearly a case where two unrelated studio jams have been pasted together, but the pairing makes intuitive sense. On Trellis, no matter where Lifted’s haphazard assemblages end up drifting, you feel fortunate to be along for the ride.