By Taylor Benjamin Burgess
Rather than introduce the Portland electronic dance band YACHT conventionally, with a synopsis of their last album or a description of their music (because YACHT would encourage you to find that info on the internet), here are a couple excerpts from their book The Secret Teachings of the Mystery Lights, which they have been selling online and on tour:
“Yes, the Universe itself is God; science refuses to acknowledge this truth, and the churches hide it from us with the foils of ritual and history”
“There is no difference between the conflicts of individuals and those of the whole, other than scale. Our domestic arguments are rooted in the same human insecurities that cause wars.”
“God is the Universe and all it contains, including us, which makes each individual a member of a vast pantheon of small gods.”
Stylus caught up with the core duo of the band, Jona Bechtolt and Claire L. Evans, before their show at the Pyramid this past February. (You can find the review of the show here.)
Stylus: For this latest album, you’ve wrapped yourselves in a lot of mysticism, and you’re talking about seeing Marfa’s Mystery Lights* and you’re talking about life and the afterlife. How did that all come about?
Jona Bechtolt: Well it all came from the actual experience of the Marfa Mystery Lights, which I first saw alone in 2005. And then the very next day, I randomly met Claire. And… yeah. I felt like that was a very serendipitous event, seeing the lights and then meeting Claire the next day. Claire and I became fast friends through Rob [Von Kieswetter, a.k.a. Bobby Birdman]. Then a year later, Claire and I went back to Marfa, saw the lights together, and through that shared experience, we decided right there and then that we had to move there. We had no intention of making an album, or even music, per se, we just wanted to go there and see what it was like to live amongst the lights on like a day-to-day level.
Claire L. Evans: It had a profound effect on us in a lot of ways. We saw it with our own eyes—there’s binoculars out on the side of the road that the county put out there because it’s something that everyone’s going to notice. It’s like some sort of collective hypnosis or mass hysteria—it’s a real thing. And we’d never experienced something that was that real and also abstractly mysterious or inexplicable.
Jona Bechtolt: Right, as you were saying before [the interview], we love the internet. So we consider ourselves to be net natives, and we have the information at our fingertips. Anything you want to know, you Wikipedia or Google and you have an answer immediately. So this was something that was very real and unexplainable.
Stylus: On your latest album, you’re using a lot of reoccurring symbology, you were talking about triangles, and Claire, you have a triangle ring—
JB: And we both have triangle tattoos. [They roll up their sleeves, and at the top of their forearm they each have an equilateral triangle—Evans’ is Black, and Bechtolt’s is white.]
Stylus: But do you think it’s important to create those symbols? Why do you think it’s important to have triangles everywhere when YACHT play?
CLE: We both found in the course of our long post-Marfa Lights research, which after we saw the lights, we got deeply into studying ritual history.
JB: Fringe religious cultures.
CLE: Cults, secret societies, esotericism, mysticism. For some reason it really piqued an interest in us, and we found that probably the most consistent reoccurring thing was the fact that the language of symbolism was profoundly important to any proper mystery school, any proper esoteric or fringe religious experience. And consistently, triangles came up a lot. You know, the Freemasons and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. And then of course, the ancient Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, Pythagorean—I mean the triangle has come up so much to the point that we realize that that it’s one of humanity’s most universal symbols. It has something about the idea of a trinity or a triad, or a triangle has some kind of—we don’t know what it is, we haven’t unlocked it or unpacked it, but it has resonance that we found would probably work well for us. We realized that we wanted to have a symbol for the band because of our deep love of punk music. And how most, if not all, influential punk bands have these symbols that aren’t even logos, they’re really symbols, and it’s almost like some kind of tribal marker of identification. Like Black Flag’s stripes or the Germs’ circle—
JB: Crass.
CLE: You see them wearing that on a shirt, or tattooed, or on a patch—that doesn’t represent, “Oh, I’m into the Dead Kennedys.” It means that I am advertising myself as being part of a culture that transcends fashion and style and genre of music. It’s part of something bigger—it’s about ideology, personal philosophy, the choices that you decided to make, how you decided to pull yourself apart from the rest of the world. We want people to have that with our band—not that we want our band to be like punk music is, to have that profound cultural relevance, but we do like the idea that someone could wear a triangle and it would advertise not that they were into YACHT, but that they were a part of whatever culture it is that they decided to take from us. Or that we decided to build. I mean we’re trying to build some sort of alternative community that has a slightly punk spirit. It’s an evolving goal.
*The Marfa Lights are unexplained lights that appear, occasionally and unpredictably, in the night sky over a specific plot of land near the town of Marfa, Texas.
