• Tweet

YACHT is a Band, Belief System, and Business conducted by Jona Bechtolt and Claire L. Evans of Los Angeles, California, Marfa, Texas and Portland, Oregon, USA. All people are welcome to become members of YACHT. Accordingly, YACHT is what YACHT is when YACHT is standing before you.

Here is the brand new music video for “Shangri-La“, the title song from their newest record. You can’t spell Shangri-La without L.A. The duo will be at SXSW.

Shangri-La features dozens of extended members of the YACHT family–fans, collaborators, friends–sharing a space of our own invention, spotted with magical realism. Every point of light smiles. YACHT believes that Utopia, like reality, is not a physical experience, nor one dictated by the boundaries of a particular space. Rather, it’s a movable feast, defined by its capacity to adapt and change to new surroundings.

Basically, any place can be Utopia.

But it doesn’t hurt when that place is already Los Angeles.

YACHT was born in 2002 in Portland, Oregon, as a solo cross-disciplinary experiment for Jona Bechtolt, using technology to extend physical bo2undaries of communication, performance, and music. In 2008, after a shared mystical experience in the Far West Texas desert, Bechtolt was joined in the YACHT endeavor by longtime collaborator Claire L. Evans. Spurred by this paranormal bond, this new incarnation of YACHT wrote and recorded “See Mystery Lights” in Marfa, Texas.

Currently, the Straight Gaze — Robert “Bobby Birdman” Kieswetter, Jeffrey “Jerusalem” Brodsky, and Katy Davidson of the Key Losers — round out the live presentation of YACHT. YACHT’s heart is in these live presentations: uncluttered, inspiring sessions of damaged dance moves and coded ritualism, backed by constantly changing elements — Power Point presentations, audience Q&A sessions, and shamanistic video environments.

YACHT has toured with LCD Soundsystem (R.I.P.), the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Architecture in Helsinki, and Vampire Weekend; YACHT is multidisciplinary enough to have been paired with the Chemical Brothers, the Breeders, and Phoenix; YACHT has played on boats, in caves, in bathrooms, in art galleries and museums, in rural China, and at the Hollywood Bowl.