YACHT I THOUGHT THE FUTURE WOULD BE COOLER
YACHT are ar sts based in Los Angeles.
YACHT’s figureheads, Jona Bechtolt and Claire L. Evans, are opposing forces. It’d be generous to call Jona a high school dropout: he never a ended a single day, choosing instead to literally “bang on the drum all day” as an outpa ent in the teenage art ward. Claire was born in England, raised in France, and moved to Oregon to be watched a er by the Intel corpora on in the mid-1990s, during the height of the microprocessor boom. But the unlikely pairing is the source of their power.
YACHT's new album, I Thought The Future Would Be Cooler, is a sweeping and visionary cri que of the 21st century. It reveals the band at its most self-assured: cri cal, funny, tough, and musically diverse, cra ing an infec ous and hyperac ve conceptual pop that seems to seep through the walls of an alternate universe. YACHT’s knowing references to technology, feminism, and media are layered in complex arrangements in songs about holograms and phones, police violence and iden ty, sex and the future.
This is the first YACHT album that Bechtolt and Evans didn’t create in a vacuum. Star ng from the ground up, the pair wrote the album with their long me collaborator and bandmate Rob Kieswe er, who also produced the album with Bechtolt (a first: Bechtolt has been YACHT’s sole producer since 2002). The result is a surprising and heterogeneous collec on of songs that only YACHT could make. Grammy-winning Irish producer Jacknife Lee (REM, Bloc Party, Robbie Williams, Taylor Swi ) stepped in as a hypercolor shaman of sorts, crea ng his own album- wide credit of “objec ve overseer and structural mechanic.” The album's tle track was co-produced with Jus n Meldal-Johnsen (Beck, M83, Tegan and Sara) and its string arrangement was put together by pop polymath Jherek Bischoff (David Byrne, Caetano Veloso, Parenthe cal Girls). The album was recorded over two years in Los Angeles at a handful of studios (Jacknife’s technicolor compound in Topanga Canyon, Meldal-Johnsen's studio in Atwater Village, Red Bull’s studio in Santa Monica, and YACHT's home studio) as well as in a former cavalry bunker in Marfa, Texas, at the Marfa Recording Company.
I Thought The Future Would Be Cooler draws from a weird well of ADD influences: 80s Japanese electronic reggae (Sandii & The Sunsetz, Haruomi Hosono), 70s and 80s post-punk and no wave (Family Fodder, The Waitresses, Suburban Lawns, Killing Joke, A Certain Ra o, Devo), Norwegian disco (Todd Terje, Lindstrøm, Prins Thomas), Grand Royal Records-era alterna ve music (Cibbo Ma o, Luscious Jackson, Money Mark). YACHT was first created in 2002, as a design studio opera ng under the acronym “Young Americans Challenging High Technology." As technology became more evenly distributed, YACHT transformed into a word represen ng everything Jona and Claire touch, each medium informing the next. More tradi onal ar sts tend to compartmentalize their efforts, but like an adolescent trying on iden es, from 2002-2015 YACHT have shapeshi ed: from solo laptop performer to wacked-out performance ar sts, from harsh electronic comedians to composers, from a two- piece avant-garde karaoke group to a four-piece a no-wave broken disco band, all while working as commissioned ar sts, writers, editors, and speakers for organiza ons like TEDx, WIRED, MoMA, Rhizome, VICE, and more. The common thread: Claire and Jona's dis nct amalgama on of cynicism, op mism, and a en on to the special details that keep their work interes ng and idiosyncra c.
If you’re confused by YACHT, either look closer or zoom out. There's a decade-plus of work to si through: joke websites, videos somehow seen by millions, subversive design projects, texts, one- me-only events, and more live shows around the world than should be counted at this point.
Just the facts:
• YACHT lives in and champions the city of Los Angeles, California • YACHT’s new album is called I Thought The Future Would Be Cooler • I Thought The Future Would Be Cooler was produced by Jona Bechtolt & Rob Kieswe er • YACHT signed to Downtown Records in late 2014 • YACHT’s last two cri cally-acclaimed LPs were released by seminal New York City label, DFA Records • YACHT’s first three albums were released on micro-labels (Marriage and States Rights Records) based in the Pacific Northwest. These same labels also cul vated ar sts like Dirty Projectors, Jib Kidder, Lucky Dragons, White Rainbow, and more • YACHT’s core members are Jona Bechtolt (pronounced John-uh Beck-tolt) and Claire L. Evans. Rob Kieswe er has been a close collaborator since YACHT’s incep on, and Jeffrey Brodsky joined in 2010 • YACHT have created and sold unplayable compact discs, published a philosophical handbook, designed a sunglasses collec on, created a fragrance, campaigned against NSA surveillance, and given presenta ons about their work in art museums, tech conferences, and rock clubs • Claire is a writer. She works for VICE, edi ng science fic on stories and publishing editorials about science, technology, and feminism. Claire and Jona are the co-founders of an app called 5 Every Day that is also a segment on the largest NPR sta on in California, KPCC. Claire gives presenta ons at places like the Walker Art Center, Moogfest, TEDx, and UCLA