YACHT, Part Two

<img src="http://www.qromag.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/yachtinterview2.jpg" alt=" " />In Part Two of QRO’s interview with YACHT, Evans got intellectual – while Bechtolt had to run. ...

 In Part Two of QRO’s interview with YACHT, Evans got intellectual – while Bechtolt had to run. Even though Jona Bechtolt had to leave during the interview to fix their video projector, he & especially Claire L. Evans discussed blogging, all the strange places they’ve played (from a bathroom to city hall…), pirating and being pirated, generalists vs. specialists, ‘nerd flame wars’, Philip K. Dick, Antoine LaVey, and much more…

QRO: This is completely from your Wikipedia page (link) – Jona, did you really have a ‘nerd flame war’ with the makers of Audio Damage [for claiming that you used pirated copies of their software]?

Both: Yes…

QRO: What is a ‘nerd flame war’, first off?

Jona Bechtolt: A really isolated Internet exchange, I guess?  There wasn’t much of an exchange, wasn’t much of a ‘war’.

It was more like, I sent out one e-mail, apologizing for publicly admitting to using pirated software that they had authored, and offering to pay for it.  And they remarked on it publicly on their blog, and then commenters – it was all commenters…

QRO: Were the commenters from Audio Damage?

JB: It was mostly from them.  They were awful; they were terrible, awful people.  Very sexist, homophobic, and awful.  Really mean-spirited people.

It was very contained, though, not even software, but a software plug-in manufacture’s blog section…  It’s funny that it made it into Wikipedia…

QRO: They probably put it on there.  It doesn’t mention that you apologized…

Claire L. Evans: Their M.O. was to destroy Jona in every capacity…

JB: They made it a point to say that they were going to have all of our shows cancelled, because, apparently, this guy used to be in a band that he believes was a big deal, and has personal connections to all these promoters.

QRO: If you don’t mind me asking, what band?

CE: Sister Machine Gun.

JB: An industrial band of the nineties.  I think they were, actually, pretty big.  They were on TVT.

I guess he’s tried – and failed to destroy us.

CE: All he’s done is tainted our Wikipedia page.

JB: I think it’s beautiful – I really like it.

CE: It’s good that it happened, in a way, because everyone who makes music on computers makes music with pirated software.

JB:

Anyone who makes music, visual art, video art, with computers – anybody who has a computer has pirated material

, whether it’s our music that is pirated, or other music, or it’s software.

CE: No artist can afford a $2,000 video editing program.  That’s just a huge roadblock for most people.

We have this kind of like ‘power to the people’, egalitarian world-view, when it comes to that.  If you need to illegally download some software to make something of your life – morally, it’s a little bit dubious, but the good outweighs the bad in that situation.  And hopefully you’re making the world better, by being creative.

That’s kind of our message: we want people to do that.  Of course, software manufacturers do not relate to that particular idea.  But what can you do?  We wouldn’t be here, if it wasn’t for pirated software.

JB: It’s true.

CE: There’s no way.  We wouldn’t be anywhere.

QRO: Then what do you think about people pirated YACHT records?

JB: We’re all for it.  At home, right now, we’re seeding a torrent of our new album…

QRO: Did you leak it, or did you just join in on the seeding?

JB: We just seeded it.

CE: We wanted to see what would happen.

JB: Of course, we initially seeded it ourselves by creating it, and releasing it to press.  We ‘physically’ seeded it…

CE: If we make music with pirated software, if people download our music illegally, then we’re sort of paying it back, if you think about it.

JB: It’s cyclical.

QRO: You’ve been heavily involved in blogging, your own, www.teamyacht.com, Portland’s www.UrbanHonking.com, and the Ultimate Blogger competitions.  What drew you to blogging?

JB: I think it’s just being a generalist.  [Claire,] you should talk generalists & specialists.

Wanting to do as much as possible with as little as possible, just using the internet as a tool, and as a launch pad, for all different kinds of projects.

UrbanHonking is mostly two other friends of mine.  I’m the third vertex of that triangle.

Back to specialists – [Claire,] you have a good theory on that…

CE: It’s kind of the Buckminster Fuller thing, that over-specialization is the bane of intellectual fulfillment, in a way?  The more specialized you are, in your little field, the less aware you are of the complex system, of which you are a part, and the less capable you are of surviving.

Because over-specialization is what causes extinction in the animal world.  Your beak grows too big, the nuts dry out, and then you can’t eat – and you die.  We consider ourselves to be an evolutionary entity, in that way.  Try to be as general as possible.

Not to say that we don’t focus our energy positively towards the things that we’re doing, and work hard on them, but we try to do a lot of things, and not just limit ourselves to being a ‘band’, or an ‘electronic band’, or whatever it is that you call us.

JB:

We consider YACHT to be an umbrella for everything that we do.  So YACHT is the two of us making breakfast, or making video, or Internet art, or whatever.  YACHT is whatever YACHT is when it’s standing before you.

QRO: You said earlier you’ve played some odd places.  What other odd places have you played, besides boats & high schools?

JB: A cave…

CE: A cave in Norway.

JB: Middle schools and high schools…

CE: We played in front of the city hall of our hometown of Portland, Oregon.

QRO: Were there actual ‘city elders’ there?

CE: It was an official event – we weren’t punking anyone.

The mayor was out of town, unfortunately.  But there were some city officials

JB: But her right-hand woman was there…

CE: Where else?

JB: I played in a bathroom once, in St. Louis.  It was a really awkward show.

QRO: Was it at least a big bathroom?

JB: No, it was very small.  I was actually right next to the toilet.  There was a speaker in front of the toilet.

CE: Colleges, art galleries, museums, rooftops, hotels…

JB: The Pompidou…

QRO: What’s it like playing in art galleries like [Paris’ Centre Georges] Pompidou, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, New York’s Museum of Modern Art’s PS1?…

CE: It’s comically similar to the rock club.  People that go to an art show also have a certain way that they think they’re supposed to act at the art show.  It’s almost a little bit worse than the way they think they’re supposed to act at the rock show.  It’s much more intellectualized, and people are even more contained.

But they’re also more open to the idea of something really weird happening, because of the history of performance art, and ‘happenings’ in the art world.  So people are more game to stick around, see what’s going on, and humor it, but they also have their own reservations.  It’s a whole different set of reservations that we’ve dealt with.

[Bechtolt has to leave to pick up their video projection system, which was being repaired]


QRO: Do you have any new, post-See Mystery Lights, material?

CE: Yes.  See Mystery Lights was done in the middle of last year; we’ve been working on stuff ever since.  We’ve got a whole slew of companion releases that are coming out: the copper record that Jona was talking about earlier, we have two mix-tapes that we made, one is all religious disco music, one that’s all inspirations for the album.

We’re releasing a giant, huge wall-sized musical poster, that’s a catalog of visual inspirations.  A lot of our art is non-musical, there’s a lot of visual art, and writing, so we’re making this massive poster of all the images that inspire us, the artists that we love, quotes from books that we really like…

We also wrote – well, I wrote – what we’re referring to internally as ‘The YACHT Bible’.  It’s not really a ‘bible’ – it’s sort of the mantras extrapolated into essays about life.  It’s called ‘The Secret Teachings of The Mystery Lights: A Handbook for Overcoming Humanity and Becoming Your Own God’.

Funnily enough, I wrote that in kind of a vacuum, and then recently I started reading Antoine LaVey.  He started The Church of Satan – which sounds a lot spookier than it is.  He was kind of a late sixties kook, and he wrote The Satanic Bible.  It’s called ‘The Church of Satan’ mostly because it wants to ward away anyone that might be put off by the use of that name.  It’s mostly a philosophy.

Reading it is really funny, because it’s really similar.  It’s mostly about self-empowerment, claiming ownership over yourself.  Not isolating your desires into some sublimated person that you’re never going to be in your life, but taking control of your life, fighting back, about being empowered.

That book is coming out soon.

QRO: Have you ever heard of Philip K. Dick’s Exegesis?

CE: I’ve never read Exegesis, but I love Philip K. Dick…

QRO: No one’s ever read Exegesis

CE: I was a science writer for a long time, and I’m a huge science-fiction fan.  I haven’t read a non-science-fiction book in two years.  I have a science-fiction blog where I blog about science fiction, UrbanHonking.com/spacecanon, and I’m on big Dick trip right now.  But I try to keep it varied, ‘cause I don’t want people to get bored, just reading about Dick stuff.

I feel like that’s the thing I bring to this band the most is just intellectualizing things, especially science fiction.  Bringing the science-fiction side to this band a little bit?

QRO: Are there any songs you particularly like playing live?

CE:

We’re trying to think about this record as a ‘totality’.  Each song on the record if from a mantra, and the mantras come together as a unit, ‘this is the message’

, so I don’t want to play favorites.  Each one has a different function.

We have a couple of songs that, I think, are easier to play, because people react to them more viscerally.  If the show is going badly, that song will help win people over a little bit, or people are more game for that song, straight pop-song.

But I, actually, really like playing the more fucked-up songs.  The first two songs on our record are completely, not obliquely, about death.  And we have some very hardcore visuals that happen, and we do this thing where we come on stage and wash our hands, I wear a cape.  That is fun, because I like starting out with something that disorienting.

QRO: Do you still do stuff from the previous record?

CE: We usually play a couple of songs.

We usually do every song from this record, a few old songs, and then some songs that are new, since then.  We recently covered Ladies & Gentleman, The Fabulous Stains.  It’s by Lou Adler (Rocky Horror Picture Show).  It never really saw wide release – it just came out on DVD, recently.  It stars a very young Diane Lane, as young runaways in a fictional punk band called ‘The Stains’.

Members of The Clash, The Sex Pistols are in the movie.  Very influential movie – it was on public access for years, so I think a lot of people cite it.  Bikini Kill talks about how that movie changed their lives.

There’s some fictional songs in that movie that we cover.  We got a new seven-inch out where we cover those songs.

QRO: Are there any songs that you can’t play live?

CE: There’s a lot of songs from the last record, and from the MEGA record that we don’t have the files for – we don’t even know where the files are…

We make all of our music on the computer, and Jona’s been making music forever – there’s a very legitimate file-storage issue.  You’ve lost the actual file that you used to play the song; you’re never going to be ever to play ever again.  So there are a lot of songs from the old records that we can’t play.

But that’s kind of good.  We don’t like to play a lot of really old stuff.  We feel like we have to sometimes, ‘cause people will be like, “Play the Penny song!”

We hate playing old songs.  To us, it feels like playing our memorized guitar parts – it’s what people want, and it’s what people expect, and we don’t like doing that.

QRO: What cities or venues have you really liked playing in?

CE: We love playing hometown shows in Portland; those are always amazing.

The shows that are the most nerve-wracking are always the big shows – playing at some cool club in New York, to me, is so fuckin’ terrifying.  But if it goes well, I’m gonna feel really good about it.

Recently, we played in a ghost town in south Texas – even more abandoned than Marfa, called Terlingua.  Which is literally a ghost town – there’s like one bar.  We played in the middle of the desert.  All the people who were there were real strung-out south Texas people, people that had been camping, people that just live in the middle of the desert in an RV – that kind of people.  And friends of ours from Marfa. 

Places where you just have no idea where you just have no idea what the reception is going to be, no idea what people’s expectations are, and no idea whether it’s going to be a total disaster or not – that kind of anxiety is really positive, I think.

Because we play so many shows where we know exactly what they’re going to be like, ‘Oh, we’re playing a club show.  A lot of people are going to be dancing, it’s going to be late at night, we’re playing ‘til one in the morning.  Everyone’s going to be drunk, there’s going to be a lot of high-fiving and jumping around.’  That’s great, but it’s not necessarily rewarding.  It’s the playing in a band equivalent of having good day at work, punching in and punching out.

Whereas places where you show up, and people are looking at you sideways, ‘What the fuck is this?…’, don’t know how the sound is going to work – things where you have no idea how it’s going to turn out, that’s the best.

QRO: Have you ever had it where it didn’t work out, a disaster?

CE: Oh, yes – there are disasters all of the time!

We don’t have anything to hide behind.  We can’t hide behind our guitars, or our drum kits, and pretend.  If the audience doesn’t like it, we’re lost, ‘cause it’s all about interactivity, it’s all about feeding off the audience.  So shows where there’s not a lot of people, shows where it’s the middle of the day, in an empty, giant room, where we feel really exposed?  Those can be really disastrous.

We’ve played some terrible shows, just terrible shows.  We went on this Australian festival tour at the beginning this year.  It was this huge electronic-dance festival [Future Music], with N*E*R*D, Basement Jaxx.  We played at 1:00 PM, every day, on a giant stage, to a giant field of three drunk dudes with no shirts on, who were flipping us off.

Electronic music culture in Australia and the U.K. is really ‘jock-y’.  It’s not backpacker dudes – it’s a real meathead culture.  It’s the lowest common denominator, boom-boom-bass.  And we were out there talking to people, running our weird PowerPoint, the tempo of our songs changes from song to song…  We would play these sweltering hot shows to just no one, on this tricked-out festival stage.  It was awful.

QRO: How do you prepare to go to the next one?

CE: You just do.  It is a job.  That’s when I start thinking about it in those terms.

Most of the time, I think about it, ‘I’m an artist, I’m going to do my work, my performances – I’m living it up in my twenties, being an artist!’  But when it comes to those things, I really think of it as a job.  ‘Got to punch in, gotta do what I can – maybe phone it in a little bit.  Try to convert some people, but, if not, then it’ll be fine – no one’s gonna ever hear about it…’  That’s really rare for us, but sometimes it happens.

Jona’s way more hardcore than me – he’ll give 100%, no matter what.  I have a little bit more of a filter, which I’m trying to get rid of, but it’s so hard to be that vulnerable.  To go out there and be that guy that’s running around like an idiot, with three dudes looking at you…

QRO: Didn’t know what was going on, at first, seeing you all at McCarren…

CE: That show was weird.  We had driven from Portland to New York at breakneck pace.  I literally parked the car, got out, and walked on stage.  It was the weirdest.  And we’d come straight from New Zealand…

We’ve done a lot of these incredibly ill advised trips.  We played this show Tijuana once – we played the show, and then, after the show, we just started driving.  Drove through the night, went to San Francisco, dropped off our friend, and then drove all the way to Portland.  Slept two hours, and then got on a plane to New York.  Jona threw up in a cab, just because he was so tired.

We do shit like that all of the time…

QRO: You must not have as much equipment as other people, to carry around, though…

CE: That is an advantage. 

Sometimes we talk about potentially adding more, getting a live band, more instruments – and that’s still something that we definitely entertain, but, at the same time, it’s a lot easier [this way].

  And we can actually make a living doing this.  We don’t have to split it between six dudes.  It’s hard to want to change that.

QRO: Lot cheaper to fly, just the two of you…

CE: We’ll get booked for crazy, weird shows, because we’re easy.

Pretty much the reason we’re on DFA is that the band that was supposed to open up for LCD Soundsystem (QRO live review) on their U.S. tour two years ago, Prinzhorn Dance School, couldn’t get a visa.  Jona got a call, the night before the tour, “Do you want to go on tour with LCD Soundsystem?  Because we need somebody…”  And he could – he could just fly out, as one guy.  “Yeah, I can get on the plane right now…”

And that led to the relationship that led to our friendship with those guys, and that’s why we’re here.  That’s why we’re on their label.  It’s because of convenience.  So it’s hard to be like, ‘Actually, now we’re a seven-piece band…’

I think that maybe later in the game, we’ll start adding, but for now, it’s so easy.

 

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