Audiopile Review: Peak Oil follow up their stunner from Wrecked Lightship earlier this year, dropping another doozy with this late ’24 contender from Lifted, the out-rock Baltimore collective that has now been whittled down to Andrew Field-Pickering (aka Max D, Dolo Percussion) and Matt Papich (Co La). Much like their earlier efforts, Trellis is peppered with guests, including heavyweights like Beatrice Dillon and Jordan GCZ, the Animal Collective-adjacent drummer Jeremy Hyman, avant-indie rock legend Tim Kinsella, and dub-ambient specialist Jacob Long (aka Earthen Sea), their contributions reconfigured into new forms in post-production by Papich and Field-Pickering. While the group’s initial albums toyed with the edges of jazz and fourth world, Trellis teases out a sound eerily reminiscent of classic Chicago post-rock, recalling the turn of the century studio pastiches of Tortoise or the fractal future jazz of their sister group, Isotope 217. But it also aligns with the playful genre bending found in the Wilkes/Gendel orbit, Lifted lining up neatly with their skillful subversion of tropes. Based on extended jams recorded in 2022 in Baltimore, the duo filter these spontaneous compositions of avant-rock and gaseous chamber-jazz into an ever-shifting, shimmering collage of textural wonderment, defying formal structure or any sense of predictability. Sombre piano vignettes get garbled by CDJs, sparkling jazz-blues guitar collapse into a vortex of stumbling percussion, and a haunted saxophone bleats its way through washes of wormhole synth, Lifted pulling an exhilarating cohesion out of the chaos. It’s a truly beguiling work that will be stuck to the platter of anyone invested in the current wave of genre dismantling. Edition of 300, sold out at the source.

***

The core duo of Max D and Matt Papich debut on Peak Oil following full-lengths for Future Times and PAN with a fresh suite of tactile, diffuse fusion. Half the collection emerged from a 2021 session at Tempo House rounded out by Dustin Wong, Mezey, and Jeremy Hyman, while the rest took shape in moments both collaborative and isolated, collaged together with CDJs into something more liquid and liminal than the sum of its parts.

Across fractured jazz, pitch-shifted downtempo, revelatory guitar, and interstitial interplay, Lifted’s sound is one of flux, fragments, and filigree. Oblique harmonic synergies dusted in chance encounters and rogue acoustics. Diverse moods mapped with split strings and the space between notes. Music untethered by form or expectation, snaking like an ungrounded cable through a geodesic dome of deep-listening.