#jona bechtolt

[yacht]

Hello friends!

A new way is coming. A reaction to a chain reaction. A new model. A New…Release.

Attention is precious and the ring-lit potion sellers on the billionaire platforms are vying for your ears and eyeballs. Meanwhile, we don’t ask for much: we just want to send you infrequent emails. Sign up for our mailing list to cut through the fluff. In return you’ll get early access to our new music and experience all the fun of following along, blow-by-blow, as we bravely attempt our first 100% independent album release this summer.

We love and appreciate you. Sign up for our Substack here: yacht.substack.com

xo Claire, Jona, and Rob

[convexly]

Untitled by Dream Beam

[jkottke]

An interview with YACHT’s Claire Evans & Jona Bechtolt on that indie life. “We’re not a brand. We’re not a company. We’re human beings. Of course it’s going to change every 30 seconds. We’re following our lives.”

[kaleys-art-research]

They Heart a Computer

2006-10-03 2:45PM EDT

The Kitchen

This evening of live performances and video screenings explores forms of expression, desire and anxiety prevalent in a culture increasingly influenced by the Internet. Doo Man Group (made of Ben Jones, Jessica Ciocci, and Jacob Ciocci of Paper Rad) interweaves live percussion with a dense collage of web-based visual emphemera. Jona Bechtolt (of Yacht) and Claire L. Evans combine music, dance and Powerpoint to explore the possibilities and fallacies embedded in online communities. In addition, videos by Michael Bell-Smith, JODI, Shana Moulton, Takeshi Murata, and humorist Ze Frank investigate how the Internet amplifies and exagerates life offline.

[dailyalbumrecs]

Paper Television - The Blow

Paper Television by the Blow is a great electropop album. This features Jona Bechtolt from YACHT, who was in the band from 2004 to 2007. There are songs about love and lesbianism among other things. My favorite song is Bonjour Jeune Fille.

Apple Music:

Bandcamp:

Spotify:

[innovacancy]

YACHT Great Scott, Allston, MA 13 January 2020 Coverage on Music Madness Magazine

[iheartmoosiq]

If there’s any one band who’s edgy and bold, creative and futuristic with their electro pop and dance punk, it’s got to be YACHT, the long time Los Angeles based outfit lead by accomplished writer/musician Claire L. Evans and multimedia genius Jona Bechtolt. And we’re not just talking about their music,, but their videos, animations, and always thought provoking presence in social media too. In the case of Claire L. Evans, that brilliance even spreads to science (she’s a respected writer who contributes to scientific journals). Last year, YACHT released a new EP named Strawberry Moon. This week, they share a music video for Strawberry Moon’s opening track, Shame, a trademark dose of their spunky, cheeky disco infused synthpop and dance punk. It’s a punchy, saucy bop, and its video is an interesting tongue-in-cheek advertisement for Kibu, an “organic life mist”. You can stream their full Strawberry Moon EP on Soundcloud, here. Find out about their forthcoming US tour on their website, here. YACHT returns to San Francisco on February 7th at the Independent. 

[thebowerypresents]

Try to Win a Pair of Tickets to Yacht and an LP at Great Scott on 1/13 (Boston)

DFA Records is home to some of the best dance/electronica with a catalog boasting artists like LCD Soundsystem, the Juan Maclean, Guerilla Toss, Holy Ghost! and more. One of their brightest acts is Yacht, and they’re heading out on tour this winter in support of their 2019 album, Chain Tripping, which was nominated for a Grammy for Best Immersive Audio Album. Supporting them on this leg is experimental-pop artist Juiceboxxx. They head to Great Scott in Boston on 1/13, and although tickets are still available, we’re giving you the opportunity to try to win a pair of them plus a copy of Chain Tripping on vinyl thanks to The House List. Want to enter? It’s easy. Just e-mail info@boweryboston.com, making sure to include your full name, e-mail address and which show you’re trying to win tickets to (Yacht, 1/13). We will notify the winner by Monday afternoon. Rules below apply.

Rules

No Purchase Necessary. Offer ends at 12 p.m. on Monday, 1/13 or when pass inventory is exhausted whichever occurs first. To participate you must be a legal citizen of the 50 U.S. states or D.C., 18 or older (19 in NE and AL, 21 in MS). Submission of pass request does not guarantee your selection. Two admission passes per entitled responder will be distributed on a first come first served basis. Selected recipients will be notified via e-mail no later than 5 p.m. on Monday, 1/13. If you do not receive a responsive e-mail from info@boweryboston.com you have not been awarded tickets. Passes for personal use only and resale of such passes is prohibited. Participation subject to The Bowery Presents, LLC Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Additional terms and restrictions apply. Exclusions apply. Void where prohibited. All decisions of The Bowery Presents, LLC are final.

[yacht]

We made a playlist of some of the songs that inspired our hit album, New Release. Put it on and let it wash over you.

Old Release Mixtape on Spotify

Old Release Mixtape on Apple Music

[ourladyofdiscord]

YACHT on Festivals, The Future, and Making Music for Xenomorphs (PHX SUX) I got a chance to talk with the dynamic duo behind YACHT about their upcoming appearance at Viva PHX (which is TONIGHT!). Here's the interview for PHX SUX. PHX SUX: YACHT on Festivals, The Future, and Making Music For Xenomorphs

[ebola-kun]

How PRIVATE YACHT fed their old songs to the equipment and acquired a great new cd|Ars Technica

The band YACHT, called for an unexplainable indication observed in Pdx around the turn of the century.

YACHT/ Google.com I/O 2019

PRIVATE YACHT's Claire Evans takes show business not to shake out, but to chat out the band's brand new album leveraging expert system as well as device discovering.

Google.com I/O 2019

Cd art for Chain Tripping. Listed here's the Spotify link.

The dancing thug band LUXURY YACHT has actually constantly felt like a relatively techy act due to the fact that debuting in the early 2000s. They notoriously tape-recorded crucial models of two earlier cds as well as made them offered for artists under an Imaginative Commons permit at the Free Popular Music Repository. Post-Snowden, they composed a track phoned "Party at the NSA" as well as donated proceeds to the EFF. One cd cover of their own can simply be actually accessed via facsimile in the beginning (sent with a Web application LUXURY YACHT created to ID the closest facsimile to groups of supporters; OfficeMax must've adored it). Performer Claire L. Evans practically created guide () on female trailblazers of the Internet.

When Evans revealed up at Google.com I/O this summer months, our company knew she wasn't just bring in an advertising look ala Drake or The Foo Fighters. In a talk labelled "Popular music and also Artificial Intelligence," Evans instead strolled an area loaded with creators via a quite cool available secret that waited for popular music supporters up until this weekend break: LUXURY YACHT had been actually spending the last three years composing a new cd referred to as(out yesterday, August 30). As well as the procedure took a moment because the band wished to do it along with what Evans got in touch with "a machine-learning generated composition method."

"I understand this isn't the technological means to reveal it, yet this allowed our company to find tunes hidden in between tracks from our back catalog," she stated during the course of her I/O talk. "Listed below's what the user-facing edge of the model appeared like when our company captured the cd last May-- it is actually a Colab Laptop, certainly not the example performers generally bring right into the workshop."

Enlarge / An examine YACHT's partner with MusicVAE Colab Notebook.YACHT/ Google.com I/O 2019 LUXURY YACHT had long possessed an enthusiasm in Artificial Intelligence and also its own

prospective request in music. The band tells Ars it had not been till lately, around 2016, that the principle of performing a total album using this approach appeared possible. While investigation companies had actually long been actually exploring along with AI or artificial intelligence and enabling personal computers to autonomously produce music, the end results experienced extra science venture than albums ideal for DFA Records (house to labelmates like Hot Potato chip or even Liquid Crystal Displays Soundsystem). Inevitably, a slow trickle of streamlined apps leveraging AI-- deal with swap apps felt massive around then; Snapchat as well as its powerful filters climbed to prominence-- finally offered the band the tip that right now might be the moment."Our company might be an incredibly techy band, yet none of us are actually programmers, "Evans says to Ars."Our experts often tend to come close to stuff coming from the outdoors appearing in as well as make an effort to

identify how to control and also bend over tools to our unusual particular reasons. AI felt like an almost inconceivable point, it was a great deal advanced than everything our experts had actually coped with ... As well as our company wished to use this to certainly not simply practically accomplish the goal of creating music-- so our company can easily claim, 'Hey an AI wrote this stand out tune'-- somewhat our team desired to use this specialist to produce LUXURY YACHT popular music, to make songs our company relate to and also we think originates from our team."Taking a Colab Laptop to a rock workshop Possessing the concept to utilize expert system to in some way create music was actually one point; performing it proved to become another thing completely. The band started by taking a look at every thing accessible:"Our company messed all around along with every little thing that was publicly readily available, some devices that were actually simply confidentially available-- our company chilly emailed each and every individual or even facility or provider teaming up with AI and creative thinking, "as LUXURY YACHT founder Jona Bechtolt puts it. But no singular existing service pretty used the mix of premium and ease of utilization the band had actually anticipated. Therefore, they determined to ultimately create out their personal unit through borrowing bits as well as items coming from across, leveraging their whole entire back directory in the process.One equipment newsworthy Appearing through the lining notes for "A ton of these popular music making devices immediately are actually made by designers that really love music, however they are actually created through designers,"Evans includes."So they frequent passion with the arithmetic by doing this that does not ultimately take into account that the audio outcome of these tools isn't objectively extremely remarkable. You can possess this amazing item of specialist that utilizes sophisticated ML methods to split the difference in between pair of different sounds, yet supposing the outcome seems like a fart?"Essentially, LUXURY YACHT created it benefit all of them by taking advantage of that, emergency room, fart-iness. ("The NSynth for us, our team presumed it drew initially,"Bechtolt acknowledges.)Rather than thinking of the NSynth as one thing that can duplicate or switch out a typical guitar or maybe synth within

an arrangement, the band accepted its strangeness as well as found even more results. Bechtolt notes songs has a long tradition of this particular sort of repurposing-- the 808 drum device didn't appear like true drums, yet its special audio inevitably gave rise to many brand-new genres. Though the band doesn't see the NSynth possessing that tradition."It's bad at what it is actually attempting to do; it's good at one thing it really did not laid out to perform-- that's what's appealing, "Evans includes."It appears rickety, reedy, lo-fi, and also sort of shitty, however in a manner that communicates to us as lo-fi, Do It Yourself performers. ""We understood we will must base whatever on some type of dataset, so beforehand

, our team believed,'Suppose our experts used our rear catalog?"Bechtolt states."Our team naively presumed it would certainly be actually one thing like Shazam, where our company might throw uncooked sound at a protocol. That isn't truly feasible ... "" Or, at the very least, not within the arena of our computer capacity,"Evans adds."So we needed to notate all our tracks in MIDI, which is a laborious procedure,"Bechtolt continues." Our team have 82 tracks in our rear directory, which is still not actually enough to qualify a total style, but it sufficed to work with the devices our experts possessed. "Keeping that MIDI records, Bechtolt as well as

long time partner(bass and also computer keyboards gamer)Rob Kieswetter began through identifying small portions-- a specific guitar riff, a voice tune, a drum norm, anywhere from 2 bars to 16 clubs-- that might be looped, incorporated, as well as essentially gone through the band's simplified AI and also ML version. The band relied heavily on Colab Notebooks in

a Web internet browser-- particularly, the MusicVAE design from Google.com's Magenta crew-- manually inputting the information and afterwards waiting (and hanging around )for a particle of outcome coming from this process. And that AI/ML-generated piece, of training program, was nothing at all greater than data, additional SKIRT information. Evans told I/O the band managed pairs of those loopholes through the Colab Note pad at various heat levels"loads, or even manies opportunities to create this large body system of ariose info"as source product for new tracks. From there certainly, it came to be the humans'turn."It still could not make a tune only through driving a button; it was not an effortless or enjoyable flow to work through, "Bechtolt mentions."So after 3 times, our team were like,'OK, I think we have enough stuff. 'By that aspect our experts possessed a couple of 1000 clips in between two-as well as 16-bars, and also our experts merely must contact it gives up eventually."" It had not been something where our team nourished one thing right into a version, hit print, and had songs," Evans includes.

"Our experts will must be entailed. There would certainly must be actually a human involved at every measure of the procedure to essentially create popular music ... The larger framework, verses, the relationship in between lyrics and also structure-- each of these various other factors are past the modern technology's ability, which is excellent."Providing picture through PRIVATE YACHT/ Google I/O 2019

This content was originally published here.

[burlveneer-music]

French Vanilla - How Am I Not Myself? - fantastic postpunk grooves! Heard them on WKDU yesterday (back-to-back with Guerilla Toss) and it made my drive through Philly’s rush hour enjoyable (well, almost).

All songs written and performed by French Vanilla (Ali Day, Greg Shilton, Sally Spitz and Daniel Trautfield). Produced, engineered and mixed by Sean Cook at Sargent Recorders in Historic Filipinotown, Los Angeles, CA in October 2018. Mastered by Timothy Stollenwerk at Stereophonic Mastering. Photography by Lizzie Klein. Cover logo design by Kurt Woerpel. Layout by Jona Bechtolt.

[beginningspod]

It's time for Beginnings, the podcast where writer and performer Andy Beckerman talks to the comedians, writers, filmmakers and musicians he admires about their earliest creative experiences and the numerous ways in which a creative life can unfold.

On today's episode I talk to Khaela Maricich and Melissa Dyne of the band The Blow. Originally from Queen Anne Hill, Seattle, Khaela is an artist, writer and musician, and has been part of the Olympia/K Records music scene for a long time, as a solo artist, as a member of The Microphones, and for a number of years with YACHT's Jona Bechtolt as The Blow. However, since the mid-aughts, The Blow has been Khaela and artist/musician Melissa Dyne. Melissa classically trained on the cello as a child, and went on to study physics and fine arts at The College of Santa Fe, NM. Since the band's inception, they've released ten albums and EPs, and their latest Brand New Abyss, was released in 2017.

I'm on Twitter here and you can get the show with:

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[todayfamousbirthdays]

All the best on your special day! Jona Bechtolt (Pop Singer), 40 years old. On this special day, I raise a toast to you and your life. Happy birthday. https://ift.tt/33vDzdJ

[jungleindierock]

YACHT - Shame

Shame is taken from the latest EP, Strawberry Moon, which is out now. The video director and producer is Kailee McGee. Yacht are and indie pop band from Los Los Angeles, CA , USA and the band consists of Jona Bechtolt, Claire L. Evans, & Rob Kieswetter.

[gigsoupmusic]

Y△CHT (Colours Hoxton, London - 13 Feb 2020)

Last night we were absolutely privileged to see one of the most innovative bands of the day perform at the lovely Hoxton venue that is Colours. YACHT (or, to be more exact, Y△CHT) are a band hailing from Portland, Oregon, though now are based in Los Angeles. They have been going strong since 2002; the spelling of their name is not a typo (the A is stylised as a triangle, and evokes the sail of a yacht). The name itself comes from a rather strange science course (no longer in existence) that keyboardist Jona Bechtolt attended at age 16 called "Young Americans Challenging High Technology".

Comprised of Claire L. Evans on lead vocals, the aforementioned Jona on keyboards (and guitar), and Rob Kieswetter (aka Bobby Birdman) on bass and keyboards, Y△CHT have, according to Claire, finally found 'the holy trinity' following a number of permutations.

Y△CHT have been making headlines lately for all the right reasons: they have created a fantastic new album called Chain Tripping, for which both the music and the lyrics were composed via Artificial Intelligence. Last night was, mainly, about showcasing this new album. Yes, you heard that right. A variety of different AI processes were used to write not just the lyrics but the music as well. It should come as no surprise that Claire has a science background. Author of a recent book called Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet, she has been very much at the forefront of science-tech, with her own blog Universe (hosted by National Geographic), as well as regular science columns in The Guardian, Wired and many other publications, plus Futures Editor of Vice's 'Motherland' science website. Y△CHT have, therefore, been pushing the boundaries of AI and musical composition to its limits.

The first thing we noticed was that the band decided, for reasons unexplained at the time, to perform the entire Chain Tripping album backwards. By backwards, we mean starting with track 10 ("Little Instant") and finishing with track 1 ("(Downtown) Dancing"), though we wouldn't put it past them to decide to play the actual music backwards one evening as an experiment! Claire has a tremendous amount of energy on stage. She is constantly throwing shapes (think: cover of David Bowie's Heroes album, and vogue it up a bit), so much so that half the photographs we took ended up having to be discarded, as she was a blurry mess. Even Jona and Rob failed to keep still for long, often interchanging mid-song two or three times with one another's keyboards, which were located at opposite ends of the stage.

So, the stage was pretty busy, and the crowd were soon screaming with pleasure. Although a band should of course mainly be about the music, there is nothing more boring than seeing static band-members. We enjoyed the first three songs (the last three on the album), in particular the very cheerful "Stick it to the Station". Our first stand-out song, however, had to be song 4, "Sad Money", which was quite different, and a lot more trancey. We asked Claire later which songs from the album were likely to remain in the repertoire when they perform a Greatest Hits concert rather than an album showcase like we heard last night. We were delighted to hear that "Sad Money" is one of their favourites and therefore likely to make the cut. Following that came a much slower song, called "Death" – which just so happened to be the first track that their software churned out when they started with this AI experiment. This was quite dark, and included some rather violent lyrics, including 'stab, stab, stab a cop' repeated a number of times. We asked Claire later about this, and whether the fact that software coming up with controversial lyrics means that the lyricist can be exonerated, therefore implying that self-censorship is no longer necessary in this future world. She agreed it was a good point, and there would certainly be some plausible deniability. However, at the end of the day, the band were still involved in the selection process of the lyrics from those that were generated. The actual lyrics, nonetheless, were not something they would have come up with themselves, but the band thought it rather delightful that the AI process should decide to suggest such strange phrases.

In between tracks, Claire would often address her audience. This again made the gig appear to be much more intimate (in spite of the fact that the venue was heaving with bodies). What was most obvious was how different each of these new songs actually are, from the very 80s sound of "Loud Light" to the quite bonkers track "SCATTERHEAD". On the latter, we loved the use of the cowbell and great guitar effects, which were also evident on "Hey Hey", another 80s-influenced uplifting track which includes quite a dirty deep-house synth on top of a Kim Dealesque bass-line. The strobes came on for "(Downtown) Dancing", the first track on the album. This was the longest song thus far, and included a funky dance bit that was evocative of the famous section in the middle of Michael Jackson's "Thriller". Again, we loved the cowbell. Claire got the entire auditorium clapping at one point, adding to the party atmosphere.

Hearing the album back-to-front, it now made sense why it should be performed that way, as it meant there was a real build-up to that final moment. Of course, this was not the end of the gig. Even with albums as good as Chain Tripping, a lot of people would have felt short-changed had some of the older songs not been performed as well. Y△CHT went on to perform six non-AI songs in total, starting with two from their 2015 album, I Thought the Future Would be Cooler: firstly the track which shares the aforementioned album's name, and then "Hologram". This was followed by "Hard World" from their 2017 Strawberry Moon album, a song about animal rights which was accompanied by the projection of their trippy video featuring a happy foot and a sad foot. This was another song during which the two male components of the band were swapping sides and instruments throughout the song. We share the video in question below: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8D-Z9rUvlqM Following this came one of our favourite tracks, their cover of Brigitte Fontaine's 1969 utterly surreal French-language song, "Le Goudron". This cover appeared as an online single in 2012 and is well worth downloading. We actually first came across it while watching a superb Italian comedy directed by Paolo Sorrentino about Berlusconi called Loro, in a scene where a rich young scam-artist is trying to entice Berlusconi to an orgiastic party in a villa overlooking the politician's garden. This tune featured in the scene below, and it was a Shazam moment. Thanks to both technology and serendipity, we learnt of this fantastic track, which led us to the band's back catalogue and, ultimately, reviewing them for GIGsoup. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJiiVWFozs0 "Le Goudron" really is a splendid tune, and is probably the most psychedelic of the ones they played last night. The irony is, when you translate the French lyrics into English, they are as bizarre as some of the ones that AI has thrown up for their new album! Following one of those pseudo-encores we wish weren't a thing (we can't remember the last time we heard a genuine encore that the band had not already orchestrated), Y△CHT returned with what was probably their loudest (and certainly most new-wave) track, "Dystopia (The Earth is on Fire)" from their 2011 album Shangri-La, and then ended with the pure pop funness of "Psychic City" from their 2009 album See Mystery Lights, which was coincidentally the first of their albums to feature Claire.

So, will Y△CHT use this process to make another AI album?, we ask Claire after the gig. 'Yeah, I think some variation upon it. But by the time we sit down to make another record the technology will probably have evolved by leaps and bounds. It already has. Since releasing the album, the tools that we used are obsolete. So, I'm excited to try to find some other cobbled-together mix of futuristic tools for the next record that challenges us in the same way that this one did. I don't want to get stuck in a rut.' We were interested to find out whether, by using AI, they felt that some of the creative process of songwriting was taken away from them, but Claire was adamant that she did not feel that way at all. The process allowed them to end up with tons of song lyrics, from which a small percentage was useful. These would then be rearranged (or 'cut up') following a method which has its origins in Dadaist poetry, was famously used by the author William S. Burroughs, and also employed by David Bowie on some of his greatest and most-loved albums.

These single lines of subsequently rearranged lyrics were generated by inputting into the software not just the lyrics from Y△CHT's entire back-catalogue (to give the process an identity closer to the band's original style), but also lyrics from some of their favourite artists, such as Patti Smith or Bowie himself. We asked Claire whether they had to remove some of the generated lyrics because they appeared to be too close to something Bowie or Smith would have themselves written. 'No, the amount of data that you need to train a machine-running algorithm is so significant. I mean, it's literally like seven-hundred thousand pages of text. So the nuances get lost. It's more like you're teaching a machine English based on only song lyrics.' Last night really was a fantastic show, and when Claire addressed the audience in her effervescent manner it seemed especially intimate. We referred earlier to how Y△CHT are now making headlines for all the right reasons. It wasn't always thus: in 2016 they suffered what amounted to a PR disaster when they pretended that they were trying to stop a sex tape they had made from being leaked on the adult website Pornhub, which generated a lot of negative publicity. We personally found the video to be quite innovative – it has a disturbing sci-fi ending – but the band are very remorseful about the stunt and acknowledge that it was in bad taste and should never have been done.

Now, however, it is all about the future, in more ways than one. Thanks to their scientific knowledge, we know that using AI is really just the start of it. It is marvellous to have innovative standard-bearers in modern music today. We have felt that in recent years, there has been nothing new any more. Previous generations had Kraftwerk, Frippertronics, Phil Spector's Wall of Sound... there seemed to be very little new to be coming out of the studios for the current generation. This is now changing. Thank you, Y△CHT, for making the future of music a little more exciting and a little more cute. Read the full article