There are some bands whose trajectory can be charted in a fairly linear fashion. You know the story I’m talking about: Basement shows lead to club gigs, which lead to a deal with a mid-tier indie rock label and a certain measure of success. But trends crest and interpersonal tensions boil. It’s not unusual for a band’s boom and bust cycle to last around five years. The rock and roll highway is scattered with the corpses of bands who lacked the imagination to go the distance, but YACHT is not that kind of band. 

Started in 2002 as a solo project of Jona Bechtolt, the Los Angeles-via-Portland group has since grown to include the writer and artist Claire L. Evans and the musician and artist Rob Kieswetter (also known as Bobby Birdman). In that time, they have covered an immense amount of ground, often operating more like a tech startup or an art collective than a traditional indie band. Take, for example, their prescient 2019 album—and subsequent documentary—Chain Tripping, which was made using custom AI songwriting and production tech and mostly met with confusion upon its release. 

The band’s self-released new album—titled, simply, New Release—doesn’t attempt to cash in on their AI bonefades, or anything else, really. It’s a collection of ten concise, masterfully executed songs that exist in the cracks between the many genres that the band has explored throughout their long history (no AI was used). Recently, I got on a Zoom with all three members. We talked about New Release, YACHT's roots in the Pacific Northwest post-twee electronic music scene, and a bunch of other stuff. (AI gets mentioned.)

You're self-releasing this record, right? 

Jona: Yeah, on a private label. 

So you're not going to release any other artists except for YACHT. 

Jona: I think we might digitally reissue the first cassette tape on K Records, which is by our friend Rich Jensen. It's spoken word and poetry. 

You covered a song off of that, right? 

Jona: Yes. “Psychic City,” our most popular song, the lyrics were written by Rich. 

So other than that, though, it's strictly an in-house label?

Jona: I mean, I'm trying to get a Bobby Birdman record out in the world, but that's been a years long process. 

You got some music in the chamber, Rob? 

Rob: I don't really have any Birdman music per se, but I'll tinker. 

Jona: I don't believe it. I think he's got like three records on a hard drive, just ready to pop. 

Rob: There's definitely some music on a hard drive, but I don't think it's ready to pop. 

Have you learned any lessons so far, doing a record yourself after many years of working with labels? 

Jona: No, it's exactly the same. We're doing the same amount of work that we have always done. 

Claire: Yeah, we kind of always already did all of our own design, marketing, and video stuff. So it doesn't make a huge amount of difference except for now we're paying for it up front, rather than someone else. But the backside is, we just get to keep the money that we make, which would be cool.

Jona: We learned that when you order some records, they'll come via freight on a palette. That was fun. 

Claire: We learned not to not fuck with the digital distros too much. 

Jona: Oh my god. Yeah. First there were scammers that were trying to upload songs that aren't us, but saying that they're us, which has been a years long ongoing thing, and is so common that there's buttons on digital distros that are like, Oh, someone uploaded music to my page. 

Claire: So we've been dealing with scammers and spammers. And then there was a glitch where Apple Music somehow just released our record two months early without telling us or asking us. And it was just up on Apple Music for a week, five days. 

Jona: Three days. 

Claire: We were desperately trying to get it down and nobody would respond to us. And we just kept getting handed off from bot to bot. It was a total nightmare. 

One question I like to ask artists who have been doing it for a decade or longer is if they're more inspired by their back catalog and the musical language they’ve built than any new artists or inputs.

Claire: That's kind of an interesting question for us because our last record was a machine learning project where we had to go through our entire back catalog and annotate it and turn it all into MIDI and make it readable for an AI model. So we really spent a lot of time with the back catalog. I think if you'd asked us that question two or three years ago when we were still in that headspace, I would have been like, Yeah it's so inspiring, so interesting to interrogate your past and to find new potentially untraveled things in your own history that you could explore now with a different state of mind. I feel like we've kind of gone through that now and I'm more interested in just doing whatever feels good in the moment. 

Jona: I oscillate between hating every single thing that we've ever done and then also sometimes when I'm alone, I’ll listen to an old song and I’ll get deeply inspired. I'm like, I can't believe we made this. But those moments are fewer and further in between. Mostly just self-hate. 

Claire: That self-hate powers us.

Jona: It makes us do new things. 

So are you listening to any contemporary indie dance music? 

Jona: No, no, not at all.

I mean, not the new wave of bands that are likely inspired by you in one way or another? 

Rob: No, no comprehension of that. 

Claire: Yeah, same. That’s on us, I guess, but I feel like the older I get, the more I realize there's so much stuff in the past I still haven't gotten up to speed with that it seems impossible to catch up with contemporary stuff. I listen to a lot of new to me things that are old. But I very rarely listen to things that are new to me and new. 

I think this record is definitely in conversation with what certain kinds of young people are listening to and making. I think that there's an interest in the kind of convergence of indie rock and dance music again. 

Claire: Thank god.

Claire: Well everything comes around I guess. 

But you were mostly listening to old music.

Jona: Just listening to our friends get jazzed about something and then turn us on to something. Like, I had never given Prefab Sprout the time of day and I think that inspired at least the first track of this record. The idea of making something as close to sophisti-pop as best as we could. We listened to a lot of Algebra Suicide and a lot of, yeah, talky music. 

Claire: If we're syncing up with any kind of contemporary thing, I guess it's because we're old enough now that we're at the point where we're revisiting influences that were formative to us at a certain age and that's syncing up with a generational return to the 90s and early 2000s. They're coming at it from a sort of borrowed nostalgia perspective and we're just revisiting it because we lived it and it's been long enough that we're like, is that interesting again? So maybe just the cycles are synced.

Speaking of early 2000s, late 90s, could you paint a picture of the indie music landscape of the Pacific Northwest in the early 2000s and how YACHT was interfacing with that or even reacting against it? 

Jona: It was definitely a reaction against everything that I was seeing. I first started seeing people play computer music and I was upset with how the performances looked like people checking their emails. Not a lot of laptops, actually people were bringing desktop PCs to the club, and then laptops started showing up. I wanted to do something live that was the complete opposite of that—that felt frantic and fun. And musically, the first couple YACHT records were fully just reactions against any kind of regular pop song structure and melodies and patterns. It was all just me not knowing how to make music really or play any instruments that well, just fooling around with weird chord combinations and stuff. 

What was the scene like?

Jona: I wasn't really hanging out with other people making computer music until I met Rob in like 2001, 2002. 

Rob: Both of us were a part of this greater scene that was more focused in rock and punk and even folk music. 

Claire: And twee.

Rob: Yeah, I guess, twee was in the mix. But our peer group was playing in other bands of various degrees of success in that sort of underground, DIY Pacific Northwest scene that was more traditional instrument based. And yeah, I guess we sort of found each other because we were interested in electronic music and pushing the boundaries of how it was performed. And then slowly some people that were in that more traditional world sort of morphed into making electronic music. A scene within the scene sort of emerged, I guess. 

Jona: Rob and I were playing in a bunch of people's bands, everyone was playing in each other's bands, like a classic small scene thing. Rob and I were on tour with Little Wings. He was playing keyboard, I was playing drums. And then we would both open up playing our own things. And it felt really crazy at a Little Wings show to break out a laptop and do instrumental laptop music. And no one liked it. And I didn't even like it, I had a very bad time, because I hadn't figured out how I wanted to be. 

Claire: But you were borrowing a lot of stuff from punk and DIY performance—beating the computer up and setting it up on the floor. 

Jona: I was just looking around and ripping off everybody. I wanted to dance like Calvin danced in Dub Narcotic. Our friend Charlie was in Panther and The Planet The, and I loved his physicality. And then our friend Luke from Lucky Dragons, he was the first person I saw to do a laptop on the floor. And I just wanted to do all of those things at once so those people would like me. 

Were you listening to glitch music, like Tigerbeat6?

Jona: Not so much Tigerbeat6 but more like Eesn and the label Morr Music. I was more at the IDM than glitch.

Rob: Yeah.

Jona: And I didn't like aggressive stuff, it seemed lame to me because it was really bro-y. And yeah, I didn't want to make bro-y music. 

Yeah, I feel like that's coming from that Pacific Northwest positionality.

Jona: Yeah, totally.

Across the country, there were these different strains of glitch or breakcore or IDM, but everybody had the same sort of general impulse. 

Claire: What did you guys call it? 

Jona: We tried to make our own variation of IDM called real RIL. 

This was a genre name?

Rob: It wasn't an acronym. I think it was sort of a reference to a production technique—it was like, chopping things up. 

Jona: It was chopping something up and doing a volume ramp. So, taking really small things and going like [makes ascending trill noise with tongue], we called that a RIL.

Rob: Like, you know, you probably could throw a RIL right there. 

Jona: And that was around the time that someone was saying real music too, right?

Rob: Yeah.

Jona: Because we were also obsessed with the radio rap of, like, 2000 to 2006. And so those two things—Beat Happening and K Records and radio rap—we lived exactly between those two things. 

A southern rap snare fill around that era is fairly similar to an IDM, breakcore kind of snare. 

Jona: And then also I would argue that the Neptunes are a K Records band. 

Claire: How? 

Jona: The way that they're loose, the way that everything is slightly off. That’s an intentional choice. It's very appealing to me. 

That was around the time a certain kind of pop songwriting re-entered into the mix with YACHT. 

Jona: I was not interested in making pop songs until the third record, which was 2007. And that was right after I had started working with Khaela to do The Blow. And I was like, oh wait, people like songs. And so I tried writing songs. Then I just regressed back to only knowing how to play Nirvana songs and liking Nirvana songs. So it was like Nirvana songs through the lens of loving Timbaland in the moment. And I guess that's what the third record is. That's when I started asking Rob for help. And so Rob sings on that and Claire sings on that. And then I realized, oh wait, I don't want to sing, too. I can write songs that I don't have to sing. 

Claire: I'm always trying to get him to sing again. I love your voice. 

Jona: I sing on this record, on this new one. 

Claire: Yeah, a little bit.

So I'm sure you're tired of AI questions.

Jona: Post-AI, that's our position. 

I'm curious if you've seen the conversation around Chain Tripping change at all. 

Jona: It's really mostly about the documentary and not about the record. No one really talks to us about the music. Everyone talks to us about the process and about how we're seven years ahead of our time and all of that. Like, okay, whatever. 

Claire: The record, at the time, no one knew what to do with it. Because it was sonically very different from the last many records. It was very difficult to explain the process in a way that people could wrap their heads around, because it was pretty early on in the machine learning conversation. We were still kind of at like, “A robot did your pop song!” Not so much about the specifics of like, how did you train this model? I feel like we're kind of closer to that conversation now. 

Jona: The second that you said anything about AI being involved, people heard it completely differently and projected so many things on it. We did an interview on KCRW where the host was like, Oh yeah, look, it sounds like a robot singing! Like, what, no it doesn’t. 

Claire: I very deliberately did not sing like a robot on that record. Yeah, what attention it got was pretty reductive, but there has definitely been an uptick in interest in it in the last couple years. But again, yeah, it's more people coming asking me to speak on a panel rather than it getting playlisted or anything. But I love that record. I think it's one of the most interesting things we've ever done musically. I think it broke us out of a rut, it gave us the freedom to take a total left turn and do music really differently than we ever had before. I don't think we could be making the music we're making now if we hadn't done that. 

I know you're sort of past it on a conceptual level, but on a more practical level, are you incorporating any of those AI strategies in your new music? 

[All three]: No. 

You're not even interested in using it as a generative force just for ideas? 

Claire: Not really. I mean, having ideas isn't our problem, really. It's picking which ideas we want to use and committing to them and executing them—that's our problem. And not overextending ourselves by having too many things going on. I will say that just in terms of writing lyrics, I write lyrics differently now. I think the AI stuff gave me a taste for a kind of weird wonkiness or a different approach to meaning. I'm not as married to telling a specific story in a song. I'm much more interested in formally how words sound and moods and atmospheres. It's more impressionistic. And I think that's a post-AI sensibility. 

(Photo by Michael Raines)