Category Archives: local shows

When word came down that YACHT were on tour, I was pretty excited at the chance that they might come to Winnipeg. It only made sense then that MIKE B from BETTER SWIMMERS and PLANET SHHH was partly responsible for bringing the band to town. A few weeks before the show it was announced that YACHT was touring with a full band, The Straight Gaze. Given the background behind YACHT and the name of touring band I knew this show was one not to miss.

I was right.

Although you can’t really tell from many of the pages on this site, YACHT symbolizes the direction I hope dance music to take. The show was amazing in that it showcased everything that YACHT is – a truly artistic endeavour combining music and performance through space and time. The previous statement sounds pompous and vacant, so bare with me.

Talking to Jona Bechtolt and Claire Evans before the show was an experience. Both of them were bright, conscientious, and generous in what they said. In other words, they had something to offer. The tour is proof of that.

“We consider YACHT to be somewhat of an evolutionary entity,” says Jona, who quantifies himself as one-half of the thing that is YACHT, “and if it doesn’t change every six months very drastically it will die,” explaining the incarnation of The Straight Gaze for this tour.

“We travel so much and we play so many shows that it’s difficult for us to feel 100 per cent as thought what we’re doing is completely authentic if we’re doing it for too long because it ends up feeling repetitive to us,” says Clarie. “We do change things constantly and we do a lot of re-arranging and remixing and changing video and changing the order of things and changing the way we present things and adding songs but there’s only so much you can do before you begin to feel like what you’re doing is no longer 100 per cent vital and fresh and scary because if it doesn’t scare you then it doesn’t feel as though it’s a real experience.”

Since Jona started YACHT he estimates that he’s done over 1000 shows. YACHT has done over 200 shows each year since 2007 so ultimately, that means there’s been a lot of change.

“I can’t even imagine where we’re going to be in two years because what we are now is unrecognizable from where YACHT was two years ago,” says Claire.

“Whatever it changes into will have the same underlying spirit to it but I don’t think it’ll be that similar,” says Jona.

Before the interview I was chatting with Mike B, who told me about some of the strange things on their rider. Among them was a very specific scented candle. Claire mentions that these things are anchors for them – a few things to keep constant when they don’t really have a place to call home.

Being on the road so much Jona admits he likes to find ways to make things easier or what he calls “the hacks of human travel.” Both Claire and Jona have become experts at time management too. They’re able to write and edit songs and video anywhere – on couches, on planes, during sound check, in cold dark corners, and so on. The last album wasn’t written this way however. It was all done in one location in the far west Texas desert over three months. “It was all inspired by, for, to, and about the Marfa Mystery Lights,” says Jona, which is an optical, paranormal, phenomenon that’s been happening every night since the beginning of time as far as people know.

“The thing that appealed to us most about the mystery lights was because it reminded us about before computers and before medicine and before astronomy and science and everything that we take for granted, most things were perceived to be capricious acts of god, or fate or mystery or unknowable. That’s where most of the human artistic tradition comes from,” says Claire. “It’s trying to understand something that’s so profoundly beyond your understanding and we try to focus on that kind of warm human energy.”

Their influences are mostly non musical. They find inspiration in poetry and other writing, but mostly they say that YACHT comes from visual art and even though they admit they take things, theories mostly, apart, and reconstruct them in their own way -  don’t call them postmodernists.

“Postmodernism is probably the most profoundly abstract gesture that the human intellect has ever come up with but at the same time it’s made it very difficult to make art,” says Claire. “It’s really hard to overcome that and to be able to make something that’s authentic without being crippled by this postmodern intellectual guilt.”

The band is still on a massive tour. They just finished a stint running across Canada and the US with a major stop for SXSW. If you haven’t seen them, make sure this show gets top priority.

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MP3: YACHT – Psychic City

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MP3: YACHT – Psychic City (CLASSIXX remix)