YACHT Exclusive

YACHT is a fantastically unique musical/multimedia group, originally established as a solo act by artist Jona Bechtolt in 2003. Two years ago, respected science writer and theorist Claire L. Evans joined “team YACHT” and the rest is history. V-Rag got to speak to the intellectual electro duo, for what just might be our most cerebral interview to date. Check them out this Friday at the Biltmore Cabaret!

GO TEAM YACHT!
Interview by Matt Roy

I'm always curious about where a band's name comes from. I've gone over your mission statement and understand why YACHT is to be capitalized in all instances. But how/why did you choose the name YACHT to begin with?

YACHT is an acronym, which is why we insist on it being capitalized -- it's a question of grammatical integrity. It's named after an after-school program which used to exist in Portland, Oregon, which was called YACHT: Young Americans Challenging High Technology. YACHT taught a kind of double-sided, holistic approach to technology, teaching kids the fundamentals of web design and video editing while advocating an almost Unabomber-esque political agenda.

How has YACHT changed or grown with the addition of Claire L. Evans?

It's true that YACHT was a solo project for many years before it became a duo, so it was difficult at the beginning to understand how to work together. And collaboration is always difficult, as it requires some level of ego sacrifice -- we're no exception. However, we were lucky to have shared many powerful experiences together -- most importantly the "Mystery Lights" for which our album is named -- and we were able to draw on shared motivations for our work. After two years now, our creative process has refined itself into something very crystalline, very collaborative. We each have our strengths, and we divvy up work accordingly. Everything, in the end, has to come together, and when it does, it becomes larger than each of our personal egos or identities. It becomes YACHT. In any case, it's not so much a distinction of pre-Claire and post-Claire. It has much more to do with a fundamental change in the spirit of the band, which was caused by the Marfa Lights experience. When we saw the Lights, YACHT immediately moved from a solo project to a duo. There was no conscious effort to do so, it was simply the result of a profound change within us as people. After all, we'd seen something truly rare, truly magic, truly unexplained, and yet evidently real. Coming face-to-face with something like that changes you. It humbles you. It puts our microscopic human relevance in the grand scheme of this cavernous Universe into perspective. We had to make music together which paid homage to that, and that is how YACHT changed.

What are your musical/artistic influences?

We draw more inspiration from art -- contemporary and otherwise -- than we do from the music world, although both disciplines are somewhat weighed down by the inherent commercialism of their enterprise. There are several contemporary artists in particular that we admire: Yayoi Kusama, the Japanese sculptor and creator of penetratingly insightful immersive installations known as "mirrored rooms," is a longtime favorite of ours. Her sense of total immersion and her rapt devotion to a single, repetitive theme appeals to our ritualistic interests. After all, we see pop music, with its repetitive choruses and ability to be played over and over again, as a kind of mainstream receptacle for mantras or single-serving thematic ideas. Kusama's dot-matrix paintings speak to this. We also love the Scandinavian Olafur Eliasson for his ability to lay bare fundamental secrets of the Universe, its inherent order and beauty, with very simple, often merely optical means. That said, we do consider ourselves to be a sieve through which thousands of ephemeral pieces of cultural detritus pass every day. Our influences range from visual art (Kusama, Eliasson, as well as Ed Ruscha Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Italian Futurism, David Hockney) to writing, contemporary video and new media art, poetry, esotericism, and the paranormal. We recently designed and produced a giant poster of all our nonmusical influences -- a kind of index -- ranging from religious iconography to films and poetry. Some of the films we decided to include in this index were Pier Paolo Pasolini's Uccellaci E Uccellinni, Donnie Darko, Star Trek, and various documentaries about modern religious movements like Scientology and the Branch Davidian Seventh Day Adventists. It also includes mathematical images, William Blake, magazine covers, photos of Charles Manson, punk bands, maps, and images of UFOs. Our influences are quite diverse: the world is open to us.

Although you work in a variety of media, why is music your main medium for expression, or is it?

We consider ourselves generalists. According to the great architect and thinker Buckminster Fuller, who is a huge influence on us, overspecialization is the greatest limitation there is. The more you focus on one aspect of your work, the more you become a niche intellectual, the less aware you are of the great systems of knowledge and life of which you are a part. Overspecialization is what leads to extinction in the animal kingdom, and it's the same for us. We consider ourselves an evolutionary entity, and as such avoid specializing ourselves. We work in many fields, have many projects, of which music is the most visible. We make books, texts, graphic design, videos, and performance. We see no point in limitation, as we need to stay vital and engaged with the world.

What do you find most appealing about electronic music and technology in general?

In a word, it liberates.

The videos from the newest album (Summer Song, Psychic City, Ring the Bell) have overt visuals regarding capitalism, religion, and sexuality, but at the same time they are quite funny and entertaining. Do you have strong feelings about these motifs, or is it parody for parody's sake?

We've always been fascinated with human belief systems. This is not limited, necessarily, to religion. Anything which causes a human being to have a transcendent experience is inherently spiritual, and as such something worth thinking about, and not worth being afraid of; we see both the pagan and "traditional" Western systems of belief as being only paths which come from the same place, and lead people through the woods to the same place. This doesn't mean we practice any religion ourselves, save perhaps the systems we have developed for ourselves after experiencing what we did in the Texas desert. YACHT videos aren't parody, or satire. They're intended to be allegories, full of symbols which act as shorthand for ideas, just as ancient mythology serves as a method for teaching and remembering spiritual concepts. Each ritual, every detail, in the video is deliberate, and will prove fruitful for anyone with the patience to research it. We have a great love for the arcane beauty of ritual, which is why the Psychic City video includes many of our most beloved ceremonies. Some are quite obvious,such as the Eucharist, and other much more esoteric (although equally as important in human history), such as the ancient Eleusinian Mysteries of Greece and some elements of Druidic paganism. The final messages of the Psychic City video, however, are simple: that light and dark are simply two sides of the same coin. That there is, in fact, no "light" and no "dark." That love, both carnal and spiritual, is the only force which can unite us all.

Very few musical groups have a mission statement. Yours is extensive. Why do you feel a mission statement is integral to you and for the fans/curious minded?

It sets the tone. As an organization we strive to provide an alternative culture with meaning and intent. We want to use the fundamentally synergistic nature of a band and its fans (who, when brought together, create something larger than their component parts), parlaying it into an experience of intellectual and spiritual value. That tendency is already latent within subculture, and we're simply trying to bring it out into the open and create a real singular community. We've found that codifyng out beliefs in the form of a mission statement is helpful to people, and helps draw out possibilities by providing a starting point for conversation and debate.

At the end of your mission statement, you explicitly note that you are not a cult. Is there a story behind that disclaimer?

Not exactly. Rather, we simply hope to pre-empt any accusations. We find that the mainstream culture is quick to use words like "cult" to marginalize offshoot religious groups, or similar words like "punk" to marginalize music subculture (of course, in the case of "punk," the word was reclaimed). There is something richly American and powerfully human about people who strike off to create their own religious or cultural identities -- everywhere from starting hippie communes and having religious visions to taking to the stage with four chords -- and we really respect that tradition. We find it distasteful how the conservative religious mainstream condemns this kind of behavior, as we see it as true spirituality. We always identify with the underdogs because we both grew up in a punk culture in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. I suppose that YACHT is attempting to forge connections between underground musical culture and underground spiritual culture. After all, both are motivated by the desire to create something more real, special, and rare than what is being presented by conventional organizations.

Your site contains a lot of free content, and a donation link. What are your views on "piracy"? Are people generous when given the choice to pay or not to pay for music?

Piracy is a difficult subject for us, as we've gotten into some trouble on the subject in the past. However, our views remain the same: that software and music piracy is out of our hands, is a cultural trend that is pushed forward by millions of invisible hands, and that it will never go away, never disappear. It's not in our interest to rebel against culture, to push back against those millions of hands, who don't pirate out of malice or disapproval, but to live outside of their means and experience culture through its media. We see our art in the Walter Benjamin sense -- once we finish producing something, it belongs to the world, through the wonder of both mechanical reproduction (albums, concerts) and the transparent forces of idea-sharing online. Everyone owns a tiny piece of YACHT. We want to encourage that. 

You're still touring as of 2010. What do you enjoy about being on the road?

The opportunity to meet the people who make YACHT possible as both a band and community.

Pros and cons of having a show in Vancouver in the height of the Olympic craziness?

To be honest, we have no idea what to expect. We've never been remotely close, geographically, to the aura of the Olympiad, and are excited that our journey to Canada will begin with the frenzy of the 2010 Olympics. Athletes of Olympic caliber refine and purify their bodies to the height of physical capacity, and we find that to be a useful allegory for how we aim to refine our minds. Perhaps it will motivate us all.

What can fans expect from YACHT in the future?

We've taken some baby steps onto a path which will never allow us, at this point, to move backwards. YACHT forges ahead through the darkness, inventing the way as it goes, until the path ends, the top of the mountain is reached, and we can finally look behind us to see which way we journeyed.

YACHT performs at the Biltmore Cabaret on Feb. 19th at 9:30pm.
www.teamyacht.com


"Summer Song" - YACHT


"Psychic City (Voodoo City)" - YACHT