Yacht
YACHT, sometimes stylized as Y∆CHT, and derived from Y.A.C.H.T., is an electro dance band out of Los Angeles. The stylistic variations of the band’s name are telling and meaningful. The first is associated with a carefree lifestyle – boating in the sun. And judging by Y∆CHT’s music, music videos and design language, this isn’t far off. With their cheerful melodies, and the vibrant colours and playful scenes captured in their videos, Jona Bechtolt and Claire L. Evans, who front the band, seem to live a stereotypical life in California’s sunshine.
However, unpacking the Y∆CHT acronym casts a political and critical shade on this idyllic picture. The acronym comes from an alternative school called Young Americans Challenging High Technology, which Bechtolt attended as a teenager. For a band that embraces and experiments with a wide variety of technology, it’s a genesis story that no longer fits. What it does convey is an ongoing underlying complexity. Bechtolt and Evans approach each song and album holistically, concerned not only with melodies and sound, but design, philosophy and occasional political activism.
G—Your latest singles “Where Does the Disco?” and “Works like Magic” have a fresh new sound. Can you tell us a little about what these songs are about and how they came together?
Y∆CHT—We love singles because they allow us to treat a song like a complete product. From the inception of each single, we think about its visual identity, what multimedia treatment we can lend it, and what online (and offline) experiences we can design around the song.
“Where Does This Disco?” and “Works Like Magic” are two sides of the same feeling, in a way. The former is about love and compact discs – obsolescence of the heart and of a medium – and the latter is about sex and computers. We’re interested in the places where technology and the human body interact. The third song on our upcoming EP is sort of a coda to those questions: the wasteland that remains after the interaction turns to consummation and then burnout.
G—Is it safe to say that the new singles are a good representation of the sound for an upcoming full length album?
As soon as we finish a song, we’re ready to move onto the next sound, the next experiment. We take pride in shedding our skin and trying on new ones. We believe that’s what keeps us from becoming complacent and calcifying creatively. But the themes – of technology, humanity, language, and emotion – will likely stay the same for the rest of our tenure on this Earth as the entity called Y∆CHT.
Y—It’s never really safe to say that. Pretty much as soon as we finish a song, we’re ready to move onto the next sound, the next experiment. We take pride in shedding our skin and trying on new ones. We believe that’s what keeps us from becoming complacent and calcifying creatively. But the themes – of technology, humanity, language, and emotion – will likely stay the same for the rest of our tenure on this Earth as the entity called Y∆CHT.
G—You recently developed an app called “5 Every Day” which recommends five interesting things to do in LA every day. Is an app something that’s always been on your mind to build or was this borne out of a need you saw?
Y—It’s something we wanted to exist. We moved to Los Angeles three years ago, and it took a while for us to get our bearings and find our people. Now we can share our discoveries – the things we love about this great, often-underestimated city – and help support the artists, musicians, shopkeepers, institutions, and places that have made our time here so special. 5 Every Day is an online tool, but it points outwards and encourages spontaneous exploration and engagement, something we think is really important. People are often so disconnected from their city, walking around with their noses in their phones. This is something you can stick your nose into that actually tells you to look up and all around you!
G—You have also released a cool new line of sunglasses in collaboration with Chilli Beans. Can we expect more Y∆CHT fashion collaborations to come in the near future?
Y—When someone approaches us with a project, our biggest consideration in deciding whether or not to take it on is: what can we learn from this? We had no idea how to design sunglasses. Not pragmatically, not creatively. We knew that we would learn a lot from the process, and we took it on completely – learning the language, learning about materials, making renderings, approving samples, making adjustments, art-directing the graphic design and the collection lookbook. Now we have all these great sunnies that came right from our brains and into the material world – a basic kind of magic – and we know a ton about the production of this specific kind of object. It’s another skill set for our toolkit. In the end, projects like these inform everything we make going forward. They expand our creative scope.
G—Y∆CHT has a strong sense of style and fashion. Where or from whom do you pull your fashion inspiration?
Y—There’s a character in the William Gibson novel Pattern Recognition, Cayce Pollard, who is so vehemently allergic to brands that she pays a locksmith to file the Levi’s logo off the rivets of her jeans. All her clothes are just minimalist “units,” outside of time, outside of place, completely impossible to pin down or categorize. There’s something endlessly compelling to us about that idea.
G—Y∆CHT seems to be one of those bands that you can’t easily categorize visually or sonically due to its strange and beautiful diversity. As a band there must have been many risks taken to carve out your own musical path. Are there any risks you can think of that would attribute to your uniqueness as a band?
Y—Every few years, we dismantle Y∆CHT completely. In 2006, Y∆CHT was just Jona with a laptop. In 2009, it was Jona and Claire with a laptop and a video projector, climbing in the rafters. In 2011, it was five people in tuxedoes. In 2014, it’s a four-piece rock and roll band. Some versions of the band are largely unrecognizable from the vantage of the present day, and our early records have very little to do, sonically, with what you might hear at a Y∆CHT show right now, but we’ve never changed the name. We just trust that it will all make sense in the rear-view.
G—Lastly, the trust section on your website is something I haven’t seen before on another band’s website. Can you explain what’s behind Y∆CHT’s ideology and the Y∆CHT Trust?
Everyone has an ideology, even if that ideology is just “rock and roll will never die.” Ours isn’t much more complicated than that, at its essence: we believe in radical self-empowerment in a media landscape of democratized technologies. The universe is infinite, which means any of us can lay claim to being the center of the universe. Everyone has a right to write their own holy books. We can be our own gods. We can share our vision with the world – we have the tools to make that possible. The only catch is that the same is true for everyone else, and so we have to respect one another’s visions.
