Oregon Music News

For the last year, this YACHT has been sailing around the world touching every continent possible.  One week ago they were playing Bogotá, Colombia.  Tomorrow they’ll be back in their home state rocking Eugene’s WOW Hall for University of Oregon student radio KWVA’s Birthday Bash.

Another one week and one day, YACHT will set sail north through the Pacific Northwest to the Gorge to devastate the second day of Sasquatch on Sunday, May 30th.

Less than a week later they’ll be in Corvallis on Saturday, June 5th hanging at OSU for the Flat Tail Music Festival on campus playing a free gig with Neon Indian, Minus The Bear, I Will Be King, and Mt. St. Helens Vietnam Band.

Bam!  In July, it’s back to the Eurozone for some dates in Deutschland and elsewhere before rocking the Hollywood Bowl in California opening for the Chemical Brothers and Chromeo on August 29th.

Hot shit!  Can you even wrap your mind around this?

They’ve been spreading their individualist ideologies around like wildflowers–sometimes in the form of scripture (like the interview below), but more frequently in the form of jump and bump dance music–all while staying “fascinated with the common ground of underground spirituality and underground music,” blogged Team YACHT just two days ago.  “After all, both are motivated by the desire to create something more real, special, and rare than what is being presented by the mainstream cultural machine.”

Which YACHT offers to us as free release of their mixtape Disco Worship: Music for Meditative Dancing, a digital version of the sold-out tape edition that was released on the PDX tape-label Gnar Tapes and Shit.

“The music concert is a series of rituals just as the religious service is; we come together in the dark club, following a sequence of understood rules (hand-stamp, coat check, merch table, posture), and we hope to experience transcendence, to have synergistic and communal experience worth remembering.”

Traveling to spread their message, it’s just the lifestyle when you’re involved in YACHT.

Back in 2007, YACHT played more than 200 shows in 17 countries.  December 2009 saw YACHT return from the Far East (China, Korea) and Down Under (Australia, New Zealand) while hitting Europe, USA, Brazil, and some others in between before embarking on their current, aforementioned, jaunt in February, kicking it off with a goodbye gig at Holocene.

Over these venturesome years, YACHT has grown from the solo project of Jona Bechtolt, first adding Claire L. Evans, and most recently accumulating its first-ever backing band, The Straight Gaze, which features musician friends Bobby Birdman and Jeffrey Jerusalem on their New Mystery Moods world trek.  (They even thoroughly hit up Canada!)

Adding a live band to their laptops and dramatic antics makes YACHT feel a little more traditional, but the audience interaction and projected presentations are always at hand–even as they’ve been opening for dance masters and DFA label mates LCD Soundsystem in Europe as well as stomping around on their own, keeping us updated on their Twitter HI’s and LOW’s, and spreading their crowd smashing, egalitarian dance love.

Listen to “Psychic City (Voodoo City)” from YACHT’s 2009 release See Mystery Lights :

YACHT is constantly growing. From one, then two, and now up to four. When can we expect choral accompaniment and a brass section? Strings and go-go dancers… those kinda go together, don’t they?

We have an axiom: YACHT is what YACHT is when YACHT is standing before you. That means that yes, Jona and Claire, we’re YACHT. But so are the Straight Gaze, our band, and so are the kids who jump onstage to dance during a show. If you’re looking at it, it’s YACHT. For that matter, if you’re interfacing with it in any way, you’re YACHT. Right now, you, the interviewer, are YACHT, because we’re temporarily taking part in a symbiotic communicative relationship. It’s an ephemeral thing, but it’s inclusive.

Seriously, your life is one continuous tour and now you’ve added two friends to the mix. How are YACHT and The Straight Gaze doing?

We’re fine, thank you.

Was it a smooth transition to tour with a four-piece band? What’s been the most enjoyable perk?

For us, it was never about “upgrading” to a “real” band. We feel there’s a latent supposition with most people that a movement to add more people to a band somehow legitimizes it, presumably because it brings the band closer to the Western rock n’ roll ideal of drums, guitar, bass, and vocals–the nuclear musical family. When YACHT was a one-piece band, it was as full an experience as when it was a two-piece, and now a four-piece. That’s because YACHT is a thing of the spirit, a feeling; the parts that make up its whole are only subdivisions of a greater “vibe” that is incorporeal. That said, it’s a great and enjoyable novelty for us to play live shows with instrumentation, despite the fact that it’s the oldest trick in the book. We’ve been doing live multimedia electronic performance for years, so guitars are exotic to us–and that’s how we use them, like alien tools.

Jona and Claire live at The Vera in Groningen, The Netherlands

How many shows are you aiming for in 2010?

Hundreds, if not thousands. Wait, define “show.”

Is The Straight Gaze a permanent YACHT fixture now? Or at least for the rest of 2010’s scheduled gigs?

The future is always uncertain to us. Every time we take small steps along the long and tenebrous path that has been set before us: we can’t see where we’re going, or what kinds of briar patches and weird chasms we will have to surmount on our journey to its end. All we know is that one day, perhaps on our death beds, we’ll be looking down from a great height, and we will finally see the larger pattern of our lives laid down beneath us. I can’t say that it won’t be a bitter moment.

Last time Oregon saw you was at your “goodbye show” to kick this behemoth off. You’ve traversed North America hitting SXSW and Canada. Any notes? Areas for improvement?

There’s always room for improvement. Artists who believe in their own perfection are destined to repeat themselves indefinitely, becoming poor shadows of themselves in the process. In our opinion, we’re terrible. We struggle in the dirt with bloody elbows and knees, sand in our teeth, in the daily Sisyphean task of betterment. This is the process that audiences sometimes enjoy watching.

Then it was Mexico and Columbia and Europe with LCD Soundsystem plus you got to bring the whole band along as well. Regale us…

We had a very productive tour. We worked out some demons, personally. We strengthened friendships within and without our band, and we worked ourselves lean and hard in the process. Every day we get to tour, to perform in front of people who are there because they were moved by their personal tastes and desires to be there, is profoundly sacred to us. And surreal. We live to please those who have made the personal commitment to like us.

You’ve been giving us some daily highlights and lowlights on Twitter. What’s been the ultimate, soaring HI… and the deepest, dirtiest LOW so far…

Honestly, the truth is that it’s one big long MID.

Where are you going in 2010 that you missed in 2009? Where are you missing in 2010 that you loved in 2009?

We don’t really believe in linear time.

You just released the single for “The Afterlife” on 4/20 with a load of remixes from famous folks and one sweet lil’ May Ling. Can you gush about this release for a moment?

“The Afterlife” single has been a labor of love. We’re moved beyond expression at the willingness of people to participate in it. As for how we got them involved, we just asked very sincerely. Andrew WK, who is a huge inspiration for us, a fucking behemoth–his incredibly difficult club mix is a total work of art. The xx, Dat Politics, Joy Electric, May Ling: they all contributed fantastic work to the release. We love it, and we appreciate that nobody took the easy path with their piece. All the remixes and covers are singularly weird, expressing the spirit of the song in their own ways.

Watch the video for the original single of “The Afterlife”:

Are you finding time to work on new material while on the road? What’s inspiring you?

We still run on the fumes of the massive nuclear burst of inspiration that struck us to the ground when we were living and recording music in Marfa, Texas, in 2008. As our album See Mystery Lights implies, Marfa is the seat of a unique paranormal optical phenomenon called the “Mystery Lights,” which were a huge influence on us personally as well as creatively. They represented to us the persistence of mystery and magic in our hyper-connected, information-saturated media world. That this is an important proof is something we can’t stress enough.

Have any new songs or recordings you’ve been testing out on this tour?

All the shows on our most recent tours have been rich with newness, largely because of our involvement with the Straight Gaze, our band. We have never played shows with live instrumentation ever before in the nine-year history of YACHT. This, on its own, has brought us to a new level of keenness, of awareness, of vulnerability, and has brought us deeper within our own songs. We’ve found moments in time inside our music we didn’t know existed before. We live inside them. To quote the great American composer LaMonte Young, “When I told Richard Brautigan that I liked to get inside of sounds, he said that he didn’t really understand what I meant because he didn’t visualize a shape when he heard a sound, and he imagined that one must conceive of a shape if he is to speak of getting inside of something. Then he asked, ‘Is it like being alone?’ I said, ‘Yes.’” This as true a sentiment as we can express about live performance.

Next stops in the NW are Eugene and Sasquatch in the end of May. Got any surprises planned? A special multimedia show?

We can only promise this: there will be a computer, some invisible digital instruments, some real instruments, some flesh-and-blood people, some without, some spirit, some body, some erratic movement, some grace, something to look at that is complex and a little bit difficult, some props, and lots and lots of direct communication.

What are you summer plans? Will you be playing any gigs around PDX or just hanging and relaxing?

The summer is cordoned off, ostensibly, for us to record a new album. We have some concerts here and there, but nothing that should significantly impede us from this particularly important task.

What kind of culture are you gobbling up right now? Learn any new phrases abroad? Foods? Philosophies? Haircuts?

We bring our own Temporary Autonomous Zone with us wherever we go; although we love to travel and learn about the philosophies and lifestyles of those around us, we welcome them all into our own anarchic circle, where new ideas are disseminated collectively.

How do you manage to keep up with your diets while on the road?

Nothing is more important than food, when it comes down to it. We feed ourselves with as close as we can to pure, unfettered natural light by ingesting energy made by plants via the magic of photosynthesis. When you consider the sheer wonder and madness of the biological kingdom’s ability to do such a thing, finding a vegetarian restaurant really isn’t so hard in comparison.

Here’s some more YACHT philosophy on consumption and diet from SXSW: