Unquestionably one of the most entertaining acts during the recent Clockenflap festival, Yacht, aka founder Jona Bechtolt and the svelte Claire L. Evans, have taken indie dance by storm with their latest LP See Mystery Lights. Brouhaha spoke to Jona about lights in the sky, iPhone punk, evolution and city-wide depression.

Yacht was once just you as a solo act, how did Claire join the fray?

We first met in 2005 when I was on a tour for my second album. On my day off some kids in Austin, Texas, told me about Marfa, a tiny town with this paranormal optical phenomenon – mystery lights that move around in the sky every night. I drove out there at three in the morning and my mind was blown.

The very next day Claire’s band and Yacht played together in LA. We met and it was ‘like’ at first sight. Through a mutual friend we met again half a year later and then it was love at second sight. From then on we’ve been collaborating on everything from making breakfast to recording music.

We since traveled to Marfa again and to see the lights together. That was the turning point in deciding to move to there and record the album, as well as how we found our voice for everything we say today – our ideology, the extracurricular activities around the music and all the non-musical companion items.

You’ve said that the spirit of Portland is punk-rock, and as a teenager you used to play in a punk band, so why did you then evolve to your current electronic sound?

I think that it all depends on your interpretation of the word punk. For years the North-West had a very isolated musical scene with a very DIY culture. A lot of the music that we consider to be really punk is probably not punk in a wider definition. It’s not leather jackets and spikes, it’s punk in the sense that DIY is punk – if there’s nothing there then you do it yourself.

We consider what we do now as punk in the sense that we’ve made it from nothing and completely on our own. The music writer Sasha Frere Jones talked about how an iPhone application that randomly deletes one number from every address book contact you have is maybe the most punk thing ever. We just believe that it’s more than a standard set of styles or sounds. We don’t record in a studio, we use a consumer level computer and a US$50 microphone. That’s punk.

You’ve previously said that Portland is so depressing, but you guys seem so cheerful!

We have to be to survive, you know! We don’t really live in Portland, our stuff lives there and our cat lives there but we’re touring all the time. Portland is depressing and dark but I think that’s also why there’s so much cool music and art there.

People retreat to their basements in the winter and create music or art to endure the horrible seasonal depression that affects everybody. After eight or nine months of putting up with that bullshit everyone emerges with these cool projects which makes the summer a really special event.

The song Psychic City came from your close friend and hero Rich Jensen, was that the reason why you chose it for the first single?

Rich Jensen is very old school Pacific North-West rock’n’roll and a sort of granddaddy to the band. He’s a perfect example of punk too, he built an infrastructure without which we, and even Nirvana, would never have been as successful.

In the 80s he was know as “the screaming poet” and Psychic City was actually one of his a cappella poems. We saw him perform it and witnessed the effect it had on people and immediately fell in love with the words and its message. It’s exciting for us to take something of his that never got its fair attention and pay homage to him by reinventing it.

How did you get signed by DFA Records?

LCD Soundsystem were on their first American tour for Sound Of Silver and their opening act from the UK couldn’t get work visas. The day before the tour we got a call and we asked if we wanted to tour with them.

In the middle of the tour we made Summer Song to put on the Internet as a free MP3. We thought we’d had our fun and that would be it but six months later Jon Galkin (DFA manager) called saying he wanted to put it out as a 12 inch. After making the video we were asked if we wanted to make an album. We were totally shocked because we thought it just would end with the one 12 inch record.

Was the video for “Summer Song” inspired by an actual experience that you underwent?

No, it’s actually a shot-for-shot remake of a scene from a 1980s movie called “Tape Heads” starring John Cusack and Tim Robbins that’s set around the early life of music videos. But making the video was an experience that did affect our lives significantly; I know that I never want to be covered in cold wet paint ever again. It’s our way of saying that we’re just as influenced by film as by music, and that we’re willing to put ourselves into strange positions in order to be part of a larger cultural context, not just electronic or laptop music or whatever.

How would you label your music?

Just as overspecialization for an animal in the biological kingdom is evolutionary death, overspecialization for a band is tantamount to cultural suicide. The more specialized the creature, the more likely they are to become extinct, and the same applies to art or music. We want to stay as diverse as possible and not become wrapped up in genres and niches. We consider ourselves generalists, not specialist.

What’s with all the triangles embedded in your band artwork?

Triangles are powerful symbols in many different civilizations throughout history and in nature, science and mathematics. As I learned through my brothers’ alcoholism, even the Alcoholics Anonymous symbol incorporates a triangle within a circle, supposedly to represent strength. Both of us have had many different experiences with triangles and symbols in our lives. We also have matching triangle tattoos on our forearms.

- Tim Pritchard & Gary J. Bowles

Yacht on MySpace

See the Brouhaha write-up of Yacht’s performance here and gallery of Yacht and more from both days of Clockenflap here.

Tags: Clockenflap, Yacht
Posted in Features