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SXSW interview: YACHT
Jona Bechtolt and Claire Evans, aka YACHT, make danceable, Brian Eno-inspired music, but that’s only one aspect of their mission, which extends to visual arts and the written word, most recently in the form of pamphlets about the history of the triangle. They will play a total of six shows at SXSW this year, with their last two on Saturday. We caught up with Bechtolt and Evans in the convention center Saturday as they fretted about the fact that their final shows were at outdoors, as temperatures dropped into the 40’s.
How has the week gone so far?
B: It’s been intense and stressful, really great and fruitful, and a dash of fun has been in there.
E: A pretty small dash of fun.
What’s different this year?
B: This year we brought an extended lineup. We’ve expanded to the Yacht and the Straight Gaze. We were supposed to have three extra members but one got seriously ill, so we now have two extra members. It’s been kind of fun to take people who never been here before and show them around.
E: It’s been nice to get back in the swing of things. Last year we came but didn’t play any shows.
B: We had literature that we were distributing.
E: It was almost more productive then playing. No interference of music, just pure message.
What was the message?
B: We were talking about triangles. Two years ago when we were living in Marfa we became obsessed with triangles, and did a lot of research about the shape and it’s importance throughout human history. So we wrote a primer pamphlet introducing to people why we feel triangles are important to human kind, and we gave those to people directly.
What’s the story behind your new album, “See Mystery Lights?”
B: In 2003 I met this artist who told me about the lights in Marfa, and I had never heard of them and had very low expectations for the experience. I had a day off between Austin and Los Angeles so I stopped in Marfa, saw the lights and it completely changed my life. I met Claire the next day, when her noise band was randomly paired to play with YACHT when YACHT was just solo, which I thought was pretty serendipitous, having this life-changing experience and then meeting someone who would later change my life. I took her to Marfa, and when we saw the lights together there, we decided we had to live there. We had no intention of making an album of music, and after three months of living there we looked down and we had the album.
E: We come from a generation of people that go directly to the Internet and finds solutions to our problems instantly. That ease of access to information has made us really blasé as a generation. But to go somewhere and have an experience, a real experience that was completely paranormal that had no actual explanation. We couldn’t Google it and find out what the real deal was with it, it was just there, and real, and bigger than us, and completely disinterested in our hyper connected self navigating media digital world. There’s something that just totally knocked us out of our orbit.
Was it difficult to translate the music for a live setting?
B: Not really, because it all came from live performances. We don’t generate stuff solely inside of the computer. Everything that we make starts with some kind of physical object, whether it’s a rock instrument or some kind of bang on a table or whatever, so it was easy to take those parts out and translate them to human beings playing those things.
What do you think about the trend of releasing cassettes?
B: That’s something that hasn’t really stopped for us in Portland. The Pacific Northwest really has a fond heart for that.
E: I like it. I see it as a return to asthetic value. The CD to me is just such an ugly format. Both on an audio label and as a physical object, I find the CD and jewel case to be really offputting and really cheap, whereas the cassette, for a generation of people that grew up making mix tapes, it at least implies a level of thoughtfulness that has been lost. Now that we’re entering into an age of purely digital music, selling mp3s than CDs, it make sense that if we’re going to make something physical we should make something that has meaningful, tangible to it.
B: I don’t care about any of the media, I just see it as a platform to deliver messages.
What has touring on the new album been like?
B: Consistently shocked and overwhelmed from the response we’ve gotten from people. Last year we made a point to go to places that we’ve never been before and that a lot of bands have never been before. We toured in South Korea, in China, Brazil, Australia, New Zealand. Bands have gone to a lot of those places, but going to the Tibetan Plateau in China and playing “Psychic City” and having people know all the words because they downloaded it on the Internet has been mind-blowing for us.
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