Upclose with Yacht

HK Magazine: You are known for crazy live shows. What are the ingredients for a good live performance?
Jona Bechtolt: We strongly believe in bringing YACHT to all spaces. Festivals are exciting because we’re typically playing to an audience that isn’t familiar with our work, so we feel the challenge to speak to their spirit directly and interact with them on an introductory level. This can be overwhelming for some audience members, especially since we strongly believe in disrespecting personal space, but it can also be deeply rewarding once the audience realizes that they can let go of all preconceived roles they’ve subconsciously (or consciously) been programmed to follow as a modern-day concert-goer. There are no walls or rules at a YACHT show. We operate as a self-contained experience, as an island.

HK: So YACHT has been described not as a band, but as a “Belief System.” Any rituals involved?
Claire L. Evans: YACHT is steeped in ritual. As human beings, we somehow need rituals—even those of us who aren’t religious in the traditional sense have idiosyncratic rituals of our own. I think the independent music concert is a ritual—we all come together to practice our roles, and attempt to rouse a spirit which is larger than all of the combined parts. Isn’t that the definition of a good show? The feeling that something transcendent, something unexplained, something “powerful” might happen? How different is that from a Baptist congregation tossing devils out the door?

HK: Actually, people don’t know much about Jona or Claire.
JB: “Jona” and “Claire” do not exist outside of YACHT. The two are one and the same, and have not existed independently of each other since our shared experience of seeing the Mystery Lights in the Far West Texas desert in 2007. Also, we are generalists rather than solely musicians. It can be Jona and Claire making breakfast, designing websites, printing pamphlets, or making videos. YACHT is and always will be what YACHT is when YACHT is standing before you.

HK: You had some trouble about copyright infringement with an audio software company and expressed some interesting opinions on piracy. So are you totally fine with people illegally downloading your music?
CE: Yes, absolutely. Take the Mona Lisa as an example—its inherent value has become largely dependent on the ubiquity of its mechanical and digital reproduction. So many illicit copies of the Mona Lisa exist that the question of the “real” painting is almost irrelevant. When music and art become openly available to the people, it becomes much larger than the people who made it in the first place. The battle of “intellectual property” is unwinnable. In the end, it’s not about caring whether someone buys our records or downloads them, and it doesn’t even matter how we feel about it, because we have no real control over the dissemination of our music. We have to be satisfied with allowing the future to take its course. All of our music is available for free on hundreds of torrents and other peer-to-peer file sharing sites, and we’ve made no effort to avoid that. It feels good to be part of the world.

HK: Why did you choose China?
CE: We didn’t choose China. China chose us. We do all of our touring based on a simple proclamation: “if you build it, we will come.” That is to say that YACHT will play wherever we are invited to play, essentially.