SameSame.com.au ~ Inside Out Australia

Afloat With Yacht

Feature, By hazyinseptember, 8th December, 2009

“We like playing to australian audiences, very much so.” Jona Bechtolt, one half of the Oregon synth pop band Yacht, tells me down the phone line. “We like playing to any audience that will have us .. even though Australia is very far away, there is something familiar, you know.”

“Yeah, we love playing for Australian audiences,” Pipes in Claire Evans, the other half of the band. “There is a certain je ne sais quoi of you people. We like to think of Australia like America but just better in every way.”

Enjoying their first week off for the year, the duo have spent the day surviving the cold weather at home in Portland, doing interviews and riding around on a makeshift motorcycle. “It’s really cold right now, but bright and sunny,” says Jona. I warn them about the heat they might face when they tour here later in the week, especially with their much talked about performance at Meredith Music Festival in Victoria. “Well, we just came from the heat in São Paulo, Brazil.”

Yacht started in 2003 as a one man project for Jona, and was to be shelved when he became part of the uber sweet electronic pop of The Blow in 2004 on the side. Unfortunately The Blow ended badly.

“It was just time to move on and do things that made me happy and that fulfilled me as a human being, and The Blow was the opposite of that. It was a very bad ending! It’s okay, greater things have happened now,” Jona explains.

And he’s right. In 2007 Yacht released their very successful I Believe in You, Your Magic Is Real, and the publicity started rolling in. Soon after, a trip to the western deserts of Texas saw collaborator Clare Evans join the band officially.

“My joining the band was sort of a peripheral effect of another phenomenon, of Jona and me as friends collaborating and traveling together,” explains Clare. “We both experienced this paranormal optical phenomenon in the West Texan desert, a phenomenon call the Marfa lights, which we named our new record after – See Mystery Lights. We went there together and saw this phenomenon … and it sort of shattered our world view.”

“It changed our lives,” adds Jona.

“In a pretty monumental way,” continues Clare. “And because of that we decided as friends and collaborators that we would go back to Marfa and pay homage to this phenomenon. At the time we didn’t know what we were going to do, but it ended up with us making a record.”

So a record was made, but not in the usual way! The pair pieced together pop songs from fragments of atonal mantras that they’d recorded in the desert, and in true Yacht fashion, they recorded and made the tracks on an Apple iBook, using a $60 microphone and bits of gear bought off the American version of the Trading Post.

“I think that goes back to our belief to do as much as you can with as little as possible. We are a really strong in advocating to democratise all technology and tools for everyone,” Jona explains.

That belief got them into a bit of trouble early in the year, when Jona revealed in an interview he had previously used pirated music software downloaded from the internet to make his music. The issue flared up, of course, with large and small scale software developers weighing into the argument, resulting in the band getting a slap on the wrist and much disapproval from the large music software developers.

“We think that the world is in a very interesting transformation right now,” says Clare. “Less of a hegemonic one way kind of culture where people make it and other people buy it, to a more open ended and connected culture where everyone makes it and everyone consumes it… and we are super excited about that!”

Clare continues, “We don’t want to take any kind of firm political stance on software piracy, but I believe these kinds of things are not done by people who have firm political ideas on anything, people do it to live outside their means… and we have done it in the past to live outside our means, to be able to use recording software and video editing software to make art we could not have made otherwise. I don’t see that as a negative move, I see it as a positive. I see it as people who are making art and music because they have access to these tools. Culturally it’s good for the world. Of course there is an ethical quandary about it but ideally we should move in that direction.”

Jona says that this belief applies to their own music too.

“Anyone can download it, we are not going to stop them… we are actually seeding a torrent of our album now!” Jona says.

According to Clare, once you make something, it’s no longer yours anymore.

“Once you give something to the world that people have access to it becomes part of the cultural vocabulary, so that it can live on beyond us. If we died in a plane crash tomorrow I want people to have access to some part of us.”

Check out Yacht’s clips below.

Yacht’s tour dates are as follows:
Dec 11 – Meredith Music Festival, VIC
Dec 12 – Revolver, Melbourne
15 Dec – Oxford Art Factory, Sydney
16 Dec – Powerhouse, Brisbane.

See Mystery Lights is out now through iTunes.