In 2008, electronic musician Jona Bechtolt and his bare-bones disco project, YACHT, underwent a reinvention. It wasn't that Bechtolt, of Portland, Ore., was necessarily seeking a refreshed identity after his first three self-made albums of spacious, albeit simplistic, dance pop. There were no dramatic member exits or eccentric producers. It all came after a supernatural experience in the small town of Marfa, Texas.
Bechtolt and frequent collaborator Claire Evans set out to record YACHT's next album in the middle-of-nowhere home of the Marfa Mystery Lights, where visitors often report seeing orbs of light dancing on the desert's horizon. The duo stayed two months, and in 2009 issued their appropriately titled album, "See Mystery Lights," perhaps best described as mystical disco punk. And Evans became a full-timer with the enterprise.
"It's almost difficult for us to talk about it, because we wrote that record during the afterglow of the experience," Evans said. "We were living out in the desert and working every day and living in an environment where people were having this kind of insane paranormal experience. ... It felt like a drug-induced dream or something."
The lingering transcendental haze of the Marfa Lights has pushed YACHT toward two contrasting aesthetics: disco production and Branch Davidian-esque iconography. Bechtolt and Evans now view YACHT as something bigger than a band. They have since littered their website with pamphlets and manifestos, including a zealous publication that describes the musical power of mantras through Michael Jackson's "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough."
By bands obsessed
"We see a lot of common ground between underground religious culture and underground music culture," Evans said. "The way people are fanatical about bands, and the way people have a religious obsession with singers and artists they admire."
YACHT's work has become expansive enough to stretch from the dance-floor hedonism of a song like "I'm in Love With a Ripper" to the whimsical, childlike perceptions on "Psychic City (Voodoo City)."
The band's name stands for Young Americans Challenging High Technology, a Portland educational program that Bechtolt participated in during high school. His days there were oddly divided between education on technology's creative potential and lectures condemning scientific advances. "Since then, I've been obsessed with the concept of duality, exploring black and white," he said. "That's carried over into everything we've done and how we present the band in both style and music."
