Yacht Interview: SXSW 2010

Yacht is not a cult--they want you to know that. They are however, a multimedia operation encompassing everything from music to video to internet and performance, all backed up with a DIY ethos of hard work and saying yes to all opportunities. The project was founded by Jona Bechtolt in Portland, Oregon in 2002 and in 2008, his long time friend and collaborator Claire L. Evans was brought into the fold. In 2009 the duo released 'See Mystery Lights' for James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem's DFA Records, which netted them "Best New Music" praise from Pitchfork Media. In anticipation of their stint at SXSW, Bechtolt and Evans discussed with Spinner the importance of Nirvana, paranormal phenomenon and the benefits of freaking out.

Describe Yacht.

Jona Bechtolt: A band, a belief system and a business.

How did you come up with your band name?

JB: Yacht comes from an after school program that has ceased to exist in Portland, Oregon. It's an acronym for "Young Americans Challenging High Technology." This after school program offered kids a very confusing course--it was split into two groups, half of the kids would work on utilizing technology to create media and do as much as they could with the assistance of computers, the other half was an anti-technology sect, almost in the vein of a Unabomber, technology-is-evil-and-leading-us-down-the-wrong-pathway, and halfway through their course, and it was a three hour course, the two groups would switch, so it caused a lot of confusion and a lot of dismay in children's hearts and was shut down after only a year of existence [and] led to some great inspiration to name our band.

How did Yacht form?

JB: Yacht [was] started in 2002 [when] I was a 21 year old man. I considered myself to be challenging technology by using a computer to create everything Yacht was--music, videos, web presence and all of that stuff.

Claire L. Evans: I became an official member of Yacht in 2008. It was something of an organic and gradual process--I had been working with Jona on all kinds of other projects for years before that, pretty much every aspect of our lives that wasn't Yacht.

JC: Which, let's just be clear, we call all of those things Yacht now.

What are your musical influences?

JB: Right off the bat, I am going to say Nirvana. Nirvana is the sole inspiration for me to be creating any music at all and that's coming from them coming from Aberdeen, Washington, which is not too far away from Astoria, Oregon, where I grew up. To see a band do something pretty wild and come from a similar place and get out of that place was incredibly inspiring to me as a teenager.

CE: I think that the musical manifestation of Yacht is hard to pin specific influences on because we listen to music of course and we are interested in music, but I think our primary influences are non-musical. We see ourselves as generalists as opposed to specialists. We're interested in everything around us and we consider everything we do to be Yacht and not just the musical aspect of it.

How do you afford to work on all these media levels?

CE: We kind of operate in this Buckminster Fuller-esque modus operandi of making as much as possible with as little as possible. It's the limitations that make us focused and creative and allow us to look at the parameters and decide what our real priorities are. We made all our records on one consumer-level iMac computer with a $50 microphone we bought on the internet and instruments we borrowed from Craigslist. We've never recorded in a studio, we've never really had a band or anything, just done everything ourselves.

Where did the title of your last release, 'See Mystery Lights,' come from?

JB: It starts in the west Texas desert in this remote, weird small town called Marfa.

CE: It's a paranormal optical phenomenon. There are several mystery lights across the world but the Marfa mystery lights are sort of know for being the most consistent and being the oldest recorded phenomenon, it's been happening since there have been people there to notice it. People thought it was spirits leaving the body and later cowboys thought it was ghost fires. It's an amazing phenomenon, it looks like stars have fallen from the sky an are dancing around on the horizon, changing shape, changing form, changing speed and velocity, appearing, disappearing, reappearing. We saw them together in 2007. Jona saw them in 2004 by himself, coincidentally the day before he and I met, which we think about now as being pretty consequential. It made us realize that there are still experiences in this world that are not quantifiable, that aren't easily accessible, that can't be easily broken down into bits and bytes of data. There are visceral, paranormal experiences that are real.

What can people expect from a Yacht performance?

CE: They can expect a certain element of visual stimuli, call-and-responses, guided meditation, question-and-answer sessions.

JB: I think that they can expect their personal space to be invaded, direct communication. It is not a one-way show, the audience is very much a part of the show and we expect a lot of them.

CE: We really aim for each show to be as much of a temporary autonomous zone as possible, try to break down any boundaries. Going to a concert is very ritualized in our society and people are accustomed to acting a certain way at shows and that's why we like playing in crazy places where people don't like to go to concerts, because they don't have that ritual built into their bones yet, they don't know they are supposed to stand and clap at the end of every song. We like having experiences that are alien or freaked out or freaking out, that is always really rewarding for us.


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