Jona Bechtolt and Claire L. Evans are YACHT, the band. But YACHT is something bigger – it encompasses a much larger set of ideas. When the two discuss this ideology, they speak earnestly; it’s clear that they really do believe in everything they stand for. There are no gimmicks here – only conviction. The pair of musicians behind YACHT aren’t messing around when it comes to these things.
Shangri-La, the fantastic new album from the duo, explores the concept of utopia. Yesterday, June 20th, Consequence of Sound sat down with YACHT in New York City for a highly educational interview.
I’ve seen you describe YACHT as a three-part idea: a band, a business, and a -
Jona Bechtolt: A belief system.
The band and business aspects are easy to understand, but without oversimplifying things, can you summarize what the belief system is?
Claire L. Evans: We have a lot of texts about our ideas, but it’s not the sort of thing that’s dogmatic and could easily be boiled down to certain points, but in general the YACHT belief system revolves around the idea of self-empowerment to a radical extreme, essentially the idea that any single person can dictate their own reality on a neurological level. We all perceive the world differently; we all have different types of “reality tunnels”, that’s what Robert Anton Wilson called them, and that you could be in total control of those reality tunnels. If we want to we can sort of reprogram ourselves. We believe that every major human pursuit: religion, spirituality, music, art, science… those are all essentially the same thing, although we take too much of a small view to understand that most of the time.
It’s all about trying to understand our place in the universe. It’s about an initial reaction to the kind of supernatural feeling of awe that we have in ourselves in the context of a much larger, chaotic, dispassionate thing. We try to articulate and understand that in different ways. We either try to re-codify it into religious beliefs and make sense of it in that way; or we try to understand the universe in a rational, more empirical way, as a scientist; or we try to have more of an interpretive understanding of what the universe is and our role in it if we’re artists. All of those impulses are the same, and once you realize that what we’ve always considered to be the great, dividing lines between all the major cultural ideas on our planet are essentially the same thing, perhaps that there’s no ultimate reality, no god. All there is is this massive, impersonal chaos in the universe. If the universe is an infinite space then we’re all equally part of it, then we have equal rights upon it. We can all kind of be our own gods, there’s no limit to what we’re capable of if we just realize that we are as relevant a part of the universe as any other human being or any object. So that’s the idea.
JB: [laughs] Simplified.
CE: But that translates to autonomy, performance, anarchy, living in the moment, direct connection to other people, and compassion.
You described the three cities you recorded the new album in [Portland, OR; Los Angeles, CA; Marfa, TX] as a “Western American Utopian Triangle” – can you describe what connects those three cities?
JB: Well, for us, it’s personal. Those places have a deep, personal meaning and symbolism to us: Los Angeles being the golden era of Hollywood -
CE: We also met in Los Angeles.
JB: Yes, the first time.
CE: Portland was the city where we both grew up, so that’s a deep connection for us. And Marfa, that’s kind of the place…well, let’s put it this way. Portland is where we came to have identities as human beings, Los Angeles is where we met and developed our identity as partners, and Marfa is where YACHT was born, essentially. YACHT existed for several years before Marfa, but YACHT as it exists today was born there, because it’s a place where we had a profound, paranormal, catalytic experience that brought us together creatively.
And that also worked itself into the title of your last album…
This was your first time recording in a studio. How was that process different from recording at home on your laptops?
CE: Well, our approach to it was the same. It’s just a different set of tools, really.
JB: It was more about just having a separate space only for doing this one task, whereas before we’d always worked in our living space. So it was just nice to have a separation, but I don’t think one is necessarily better than the other. I still want people to make records in their home, I don’t want us to be like, “Oh, no! You have to record in a studio!” – before, we’d never done that. For us it was more like an experiment to see what it’s like. I really like how it worked, I think we worked well in that environment. It was essentially the same idea. We got into the studio and had an engineer for about a day just to set up microphones for us because we’re not great at using those kinds of tools. So after it was all set up they just gave us the keys and we were completely alone, so we recorded and engineered everything ourselves. It was just the two of us.
CE: We didn’t bring anything to the studio.
JB: In terms of songs, yeah. We wrote everything as we were recording it, which is how we’ve always done everything. We use the computer and the recording application as a writing tool.
CE: So it’s a living document of that time, it’s exactly what we were experiencing or thinking about for the four or five months we were working on the record.
JB: And those places informed that experience deeply.
Photo by Alin Dragulin
Did you just movie from city to city for the different songs?
JB: We really brought all of the songs around.
CE: It started in Portland.
JB: But I don’t think any of the songs are really from one particular place. All three places are in every song.
There’s an apocalyptic thread running through a lot of the new songs. What inspired that?
CE: Well, we’ve always been interested in binaries: black and white, life and death…
JB: Beginnings and ends…
CE: Love and hate. Dualities are really interesting to us, and we allow that to inform a lot of our performances as they’re two of us and we each bring something different to the table. Our collaborative process is kinda like we’re two puzzle pieces that fill in the missing spaces in each others’ puzzles… well, that doesn’t really make any sense… [laughs]
JB: [laughs] A jigsaw puzzle with two pieces. It’s really simple.
CE: It’s like a ying-yang. Just because of the nature of how we work as a creative duo, we think about the two sides of any idea. On this record, for us, we set out to make a record about the idea of utopia, but we didn’t want to create something that was myopic and only point towards one thing. You can’t have utopia without dystopia. I think it’s interesting that you picked up an apocalyptic feel, because you could read it the other way around if you wanted to. Both of those ideas are there, both of those threads are there. The negative is probably the most dynamic, because we’re all terrified of the environmental apocalypse and end of the world in 2012 or something.
It’s something that’s been part of the public consciousness so much more lately. There are still a lot of people who believe that the end of the world is coming soon. I’m sure it’s purely coincidental, the timing of this album coming out…
CE: It’s funny, we didn’t know that the rapture was going to happen. We couldn’t have planned that better. We live in strange times. People have believed the world was going to end since the beginning of the world, that sort of millennial apocalyptic fervor is within us all. I think we all have a little bit of an apocalyptic death wish built into us for some reason, especially in a world that seems overstimulating and overcomplicated.
JB: We want to be the last people.
CE: We want to be responsible for something big.
Another thread that runs through this album is the movement of heavenly bodies, outer space and the stars. What sort of influence does the astronomical or paranormal play in the creative process?
CE: It’s kind of huge. The mystery lights of Marfa, Texas – perhaps those are astronomical phenomena, but nobody really knows. It could be something else. But that is an experience. I think the profundity of the mystery of the universe and of the paranormal sky-based, light-based experiences, these kinds of things put us in our place. At the same time it helps us to remember that from most of human history up until the industrial revolution or maybe the enlightenment everything was magic. Astronomy was magic, biology was magic, the tides were magic, everything was either the will of the gods or an unknowable mystery. That’s what informed the bulk of human creative output up until the 20th century. Living in the world that we live in now, this massively interconnected, information-saturated world, we forget that. We may feel like we’ve figured everything out because we’re capable of simultaneous communication, and we know about cosmic background radiation, and we have CAT-scan machines and stuff. But we still don’t understand ourselves in the context of the universe, and that we’re still floating in a void of chaos and nothingness and that’s something we’ll never be able to consolidate with our rationalist, empirical, scientific world view. So yes, I think the stars and the heavenly bodies are always an easy reminder of that. We’re always interested in the mystical. Plus, we’re really into sci-fi. [laughs]
Photo by Alin Dragulin
Moving back to the more tangible, I’ve read that you are influenced by books, films and other music while you’re going in to the studio. Was there anything in particular you were reading while making Shangri-La?
CE: Oh, yeah.
JB: Definitely.
CE: So much. I mean, we want to make an album about the idea of utopia, so our process when it comes to doing that sort of thing is to try and fill our brains with as much possibly relevant material as possible. We read Thomas Moore’s Utopia, H.G. Wells and Francis Bacon. All of the sort of utopian literature. We were really into Robert Anton Wilson while making this album.
JB: Timothy Leary.
CE: And Timothy Leary. [laughs] His eight circuit consciousness stuff – the idea that at our highest circuits of consciousness we’re capable of reprogramming ourselves, reprogramming our reality. That’s an idea that was kind of appealing to us, just because we love self-directed understandings of the world; we love that kind of radical self-empowerment. So, a lot of that . There’s a lot of Robert Anton Wilson on the record, I think. But we were also steeping ourselves on the flipside of that, the dystopian stuff. We were watching documentaries about Jonestown, reading a lot about cults and communes and separatist communities throughout history. And reading a lot of bleak, dystopian science fiction, as well: Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, stuff like that.
Moving away from the record and to your live shows. It’s important to you that you never perform the same show twice. Are there any creative techniques you have to make sure you always give your audience something different?
JB: I think relying on the audience is the biggest trick. Knowing that the audience is different every time, and really paying attention to each individual and trying to pull as much creatively through energy from those people.
CE: I think audiences really underestimate how much power they really bring.
JB: Each audience is completely different. Even if we play in the same city twice, it doesn’t matter, they’re always going to be different.
CE: The collective spirit of a group of people together… there’s something kind of intangible and weird about that.
JB: Location has a lot to do with it, too.
CE: We try to keep ourselves as scared as possible. We change things around, we try to rearrange the band, we add new people, we make new songs, we decide on different musical techniques, we make video and interactive elements. We never want to be complacent.
JB: We’re never satisfied. We’re always thinking that we did a horrible job and try to change it completely and do something better every time.
CE: The more scared we are, the more sort of hungry and keen we are, and the more able we are to turn one situation into a different situation. It’s an alchemical thing that happens in music sometimes.
On the topic of the unexpected, one of the more fun things to hit the internet recently was your cover of Judas Priest’s “Breaking the Law”. What led you to pick that song?
JB: It’s funny. This is the second cover that we’ve done that my older brother’s high school band covered. So maybe we’ll just go through a really strange catalog of my older brother’s high school interests.
CE: What was the other one?
JB: The other one was “Burn and Rob” by – I think they’re from Coney Island – this solo artist named Paleface, who still plays, but now he has a woman with him called Mo, so they’re called Paleface and Mo. But yeah, there’s a song called “Burn and Rob” which we covered before that my brother also played. But yeah, I fell in love with [“Breaking the Law”] hearing my brother play it, when I was maybe 10 or 11 years old. And the video? Oh my god, the “Breaking the Law” video, it’s one of my favorite heavy metal videos of all time. Judas Priest is a great band.
CE: Yeah, super great band.
JB: Full of mystery. We tried playing it straight, but it didn’t work and didn’t feel right. I don’t know how [our] version came about. I think it came from listening to Italian disco music.
CE: Yes! We were literally listening to Italian disco music.
JB: We’d given up, we weren’t going to do this cover. We wanted to do at least one cover in the set, because we love playing songs that we love. Then we heard a song in sort of the style of the way we wanted to do the cover, and tried it like that and it just felt right.
If we’re supposed to expect something different from you with every release and every show, should we not rule out a heavy metal YACHT album?
JB: [laughs] You shouldn’t, no.
CE: No, don’t rule it out. Why not? I want a punk album sometime.
JB: I was really fond of industrial metal when I was 13 years old, so I could see it being more industrial than straight metal.
CE: It’s hard, because sometimes we try to do a song in a certain style and it ends up just sounding like us. It would be really difficult to do a straight metal album, it would just sound like YACHT does metal. Which is good, you know?
JB: Our spirit always seeps in somehow.
Photography (including feature photo) by Alin Dragulin.
Jona Bechtolt and Claire L. Evans are YACHT, the band. But YACHT is something bigger – it encompasses a much larger set of ideas. When the two discuss this ideology, they speak earnestly; it’s clear that they really do believe in everything they stand for. There are no gimmicks here – only conviction. The pair of musicians behind YACHT aren’t messing around when it comes to these things.
