Jona Bechtolt of Yacht was kind enough to answer some questions for Friday Night Music Club’s first edition of “Five Questions With….” We talked about Yacht’s upcoming Australian tour, touring with DFA label mates and now best friends LCD Soundsystem, recording deep in a Texas desert with one $50 mic, borrowed instruments & a drum kit bought off Craigslist, and a whole lot more….read on!

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1* So this is your 2nd time to Australia (as YACHT)…what are you looking forward to the most? Is there anything on your to do list while you’re here?

This will actually be the third time YACHT has toured Australia, but let’s just put the past behind us because this will be the first time the one true version of YACHT will be landing in your beautiful land. YACHT are born-again, washed anew in the South Pacific, and ready to speak directly with the spirit.

2* Have you heard much about The Meredith Music Festival? Will we see you in The Pink Flamingo during the early hours of the morning? Will you be competing in The Meredith Gift?

We have not heard enough about the Meredith Music Festival to understand any of these references you’re making, but we’re certainly curious about this “Pink Flamingo” you speak of. Is it some kind of exercise gym or productive morning meeting conference room for business-minded early risers like us? Do they have Wi-Fi? In the future, we’ll have some work we need to catch up on.

On a different note, we take all competitions as very serious business. If YACHT is to enter in a competition, YACHT will enter with the goal of winning the competition and YACHT will win the competition.

3* Tell us more about the whole Summer Song, LCD Soundsystem & DFA thing…Any interesting / hilarious tour stories you can share with us?

We wrote and recorded Summer Song in about 25 minutes flat. It was meant to be a teamyacht.com blog exclusive, a free track written both to poke fun of, and express our undying love to, LCD Soundsystem. It was recorded, in fact, during a day off on our tour with them. Our intention was for Summer Song to have a singular lifespan as a free piece of musical ether, but its life was extended again and again — first when DFA offered to make a 12″ single, then when we shot the music video, then as we included it on See Mystery Lights. Sometimes the when the spirit is working in a light space, the result is the most pure.

4* Can you give us an insight into your musical creation process / journey? What instruments / equipment did you use during the writing of See Mystery Lights? Has the process / journey changed much with the addition of Claire?

See Mystery Lights was recorded in a small house deep in the Far West Texas desert. We moved there, to a small town named Marfa, with the intent of recording a piece of music somehow influenced or channeled by a local paranormal phenomenon, the Marfa “Mystery Lights.” Before the move, we had experienced the Lights once, on a journey across Texas towards the West Coast, to California. The phenomenon of the Lights, which is unexplained, optical, and native to the region, made a very deep impression on us as people and artists. We were, honestly, profoundly distraught by the existence of something both as unequivocally REAL and yet utterly MYSTERIOUS in the world; we had heard of such things (ghosts, UFO sightings, dowsing, etc), but never experienced them physically. We were, and are, “normal” people — not kooks. However, the experience permanently changed our perspective, and we were committed to making something which might evoke in others some of the same feelings we experienced in that first moment under the desert night sky, surrounded by blinking lights and flashing orbs.

As for the technical aspects of the recording, we hardly remember. It’s our policy to do as much as possible with the least possible means. We believe in economy of energy and materials, and we strive to do the impossible — to make something out of nothing. It’s the perpetual motion machine, the alchemical gold, of our trade. See Mystery Lights was made in a shed, with one $50 microphone, a consumer-level iMac computer, borrowed instruments, and a drum kit bought on Craigslist.

5* Are you able to tell us what you have planned for the YACHT live experience for this upcoming Australian tour?

All we can tell you about the upcoming Australian incarnation of the YACHT live experience is that it will be unlike any previous versions of the YACHT live experience ever experienced, especially in Australia. We make herculean efforts to ensure that YACHT show is never twice the same — it’s very important to us to avoid making the impression that YACHT is a “well-oiled machine,” or other such consistently functional media-producing device. YACHT is not a “well-oiled machine.” YACHT is a perpetually evolving, technology-assisted mutable experience whose only regularity is the presence of two fleshy bipeds (us) and an Apple brand laptop computer. Everything else is open to adaptation, interpretation, and destruction.

Thanks very much for your time Jona!

Thank you for asking.

Love,

Jona & Claire

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