YACHT, the electro-pop group whose 2009 album, See Mystery Lights, garnered significant critical acclaim, spoke recently with Inyourspeakers about everything ranging from Kurt Cobain to vegan crepes, and even a little about karate drums. Oh, and the Oregonian duo also shared their thoughts concerning the current state and flux of the recording industry, their mission as live entertainers, and the ups and downs of the Free Music age.

It's an unbelievable time to be involved with music. As the profits get lower, the stakes get higher; and all the while, the Internet underground only grows. Luckily for us, YACHT has taken advantage of this knowledge. The group realizes the ability to 'be everywhere' is becoming more commonplace, as powerful business tools become more available at the consumer level. Moreover, social networking systems like Facebook are bringing a method to the interconnected madness. The individual (or music fan, in our case) is becoming more organized and agile, while overconfident corporations (a.k.a big name record labels) are slowly beginning to collapse under their own weight, and through a bottom they never thought would drop out. Obviously, the music industry is a perfect metaphor for the whole twisted mess.

Inyourspeakers: What is your ideal breakfast?

Jona: I had a friend who in 2004 was doing a project asking people what their favorite breakfasts were and drawing them. Mine was - and still is - a small bowl of rice, vegan crepes, a tofu scramble, veggie sausage, french-press coffee, a cup of genmai-cha tea, a fresh-squeezed orange juice, and a pile of steamed greens, preferably kale.

Claire: Mine is a cup of black coffee and a piece of toast.

IYS: You use a lot of recording software in the creation of your music. How much of your songwriting process is purely experimentation, how much is diligent programming, and how much begins with an instrument, words or vocals?

Jona: The YACHT recording process has been, historically, experimental.
But with our last record, it was motivated by a rare optical paranormal phenomenon in the Far West Texas desert, where we were living while recording the album. After experiencing this phenomenon, the album came to us as if by direct revelation. We woke up after three months and it was finished. That said, we used the same simple tools we always do – a consumer-level iMac, one $50 condenser microphone bought online, and borrowed instruments.

IYS: What production techniques do you favor and which do you feel particularly challenged by?

Jona: We record everything ourselves in our small apartment with consumer-level tools and broken, borrowed instruments, so honestly the only production technique that would overwhelm us would be recording in an actual studio, with someone else at the helm. We probably couldn't handle revoking that level of creative control. YACHT is very intimate for us in that sense.

IYS: It often seems like certain genres of music are robbed rather unfairly at times of their artistic credibility, in particular dance music. See Mystery Lights is no doubt a dance record, but there is also a very timeless quality to it and a substance that is almost hidden beneath the glossy surface. How much do you consider yourself an artist and how much do you see yourself as an entertainer? How do you define the distinction between serious songcrafting and pure dance production in an increasingly digital environment?

Claire: We see pop music as the perfect vehicle for what we want to be doing. It has a repetitive quality, (especially on the dance side of pop music) that is a safe and consistent framework for communication for the dissemination of messages. People listen to their favorite pop songs hundreds, maybe thousands of times in their lives, often forsaking message for medium and completely ignoring or misunderstanding the lyrical content, which is traditionally seen as secondary. What better place to hide a subliminal message? We're happy to take on a "lesser" genre as our own. People judge dance music unfairly and imagine that it's somehow easier to create dance music than it is to explore, as you say, "serious songcraft." It isn't, obviously. It's like writing a joke: it has to appear effortless otherwise it can't possibly work, and yet a huge amount of thought and effort goes into it. The same is true for showmanship, for being an entertainer. The art is in concealing the scars.

IYS: What are your favorite records at the moment?

Jona: We love the new Bobby Birdman album, New Moods. We're taking him on tour with us in North America and hopefully beyond. The new White Rainbow release, New Clouds, is also incredible.

Claire: We're lucky to have a tight-knit community of musician friends who inspire us, but we also deeply love and respect those who came before us, and listen to lot of early-80s California punk: Black Flag, Descendents, the Suburban Lawns, X, the Germs, the Screamers.

IYS: The sound of See Mystery Lights is a departure point from the more minimal sound of your previous recordings. It is also decidedly distinct from a lot of DFA’s catalogue. How much influence did teaming up with DFA have on the sound of See Mystery Lights? And where did you choose not to make compromises?

Jona: Most people, when they think of DFA, think of a dance-punk sound that is definitive of its more successful releases -- LCD Soundsystem, the Rapture, the Juan Maclean. But DFA is a spectacularly diverse label, and releases huge amounts of music every year that doesn't at all fit under the umbrella of the so-called "DFA sound:" noise music, Japanese experimental music, lo-fi stuff. We consider ourselves to be in line with that end of the DFA tradition, but with a nod to the people who've welcomed us into that community. That said, we've never had to compromise.

DFA gives us complete creative control; down to the press releases we write ourselves, and the graphic design of all peripheral promotional materials.

IYS: As an insider, what is your opinion on the state of the music industry as we enter a new decade?

Jona: Which music industry? The decaying remains of the majors? The hundreds of cassette tape labels that are blooming all over America? The car-trunk rap-mix tape industry? The small indie labels like Marriage Records and States Rights Records, which push beautiful, thoughtfully made releases out of garages and home offices? The kids who give their music away for free on MySpace? As the old models fall apart and desperately flail to retain shreds of cash and relevance, hundreds of new opportunities come to fruition. We live in a unique age with unprecedented access to the tools of media-making, and we all have the power, if motivated, to create our own sustainable micro-industries. Even though there are occasional moments of doom and gloom, like the recent news of Live Nation and Ticketmaster merging into one joyless corporate behemoth, the worst changes can only foster a richer counterculture. And with the Internet in our hands, we don't have to do anything we don't want to. So the music industry is falling apart, and it's never been a better time to make music. Nothing excites us more.

IYS: When you're not touring or making records, how much time do you typically devote to actively listening to music? From where do you draw the most influence?

Claire: We listen to very little music, honestly. We draw more inspiration from art than we do from the music world, and there are several contemporary artists in particular that we admire, one of which is Yayoi Kusama, the Japanese sculptor and creator of immersive installations known as "mirrored rooms," is a longtime favorite of ours. Her sense of depth and her psychedelically rapt devotion to a single, repetitive theme appeals to our ritualistic interests. After all, we see pop music, with its repetitive choruses and ability to be played over and over again, as a kind of mainstream receptacle for mantras and single-serving thematic ideas. Kusama's dot-matrix paintings really echo that theme.

That said, we do consider ourselves to be a sieve through which thousands of ephemeral pieces of cultural detritus pass every day, and our interests change radically as we explore and develop them. Our influences range from visual art (Kusama, Eliasson, as well as Ed Ruscha Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Italian Futurism, David Hockney) to writing, contemporary video and new media art, poetry, esotericism, and the paranormal. We recently designed and produced a giant poster of all our nonmusical influences – a kind of index -- ranging from religious iconography to films and poetry. It also includes mathematical images, William Blake, magazine covers, photos of Charles Manson, punk bands, maps, and images of UFOs. The world is open to us.

IYS: It seems sometimes like there are more active musicians in 2010 than there have ever been cumulatively over the past century of popular music. Having been at this for a while, would you say there is a collaborative spirit in the music world, or do you sense that many musicians have to make compromises in order to compete for exposure in the thick of a crowd?

Jona: It's a two-edged sword. Firstly, we don't think there's any more musicians now than before -- only that they're more visible. Because of the open access to the tools needed to make and promote music, the Internet is swelling with bands, and it's a hugely exciting time to be a fan of music, because the options are endless. People tinkering with cassette recordings in their bedroom can now have direct access to people who love bedroom-tinkering music. Those people no longer have to scrounge and hunt for one another. It's a beautiful thing. That said, our generation is somewhat poisoned by choice, and the waves of trend and success now move so quickly that bands are never given a chance to develop and show the world what they are capable of, because things have become so compartmentalized into memes and bullet points. We advocate an adaptation of the Slow Food Movement to music: the Slow Music Movement. People need to take the time to learn about bands, rather than lumping them into broad shorthand categories like chillwave, etc, and dismissing them as soon as they achieve a modicum of success. It's absurd.

IYS: What was your favorite musical instrument ten years ago? What is it now?

Jona: Ten years ago, I really loved a small instrument I called a "karate drum," because I first saw it in the Karate Kid. It's a handheld drum with two faces, and a small ball -- you spin it and the ball strikes the faces with a really nice tone. I think now my favorite instrument is the straight-up electric bass.

Claire: Ten years ago, for me, it was the guitar. That was my era of awkward guitar lessons and picking Weezer songs out from hours of listening. Now, I suppose my favorite instrument is the computer, as its the meta-instrument that contains all other instruments.

IYS: The description of YACHT on your blog expresses a desire for YACHT to be a 'work of art without an author,' and a communal experience as opposed to merely a voyeuristic one. How do you go about accomplishing this live and do you feel you are succeeding in your aims?

Claire: Well, the notion of YACHT being a work of art without an author refers, specifically, to the live show. Of course we take pride and intent in the authorship of our music, although we do believe that once it's released it does belong to everyone a little. We want the YACHT live show, however, to be as much like a Temporary Autonomous Zone as possible, a pirate utopia, a secret society, a place without preconceived audience-performer gestures. We recognize that concerts have their own specific social rituals associated with them -- the way people stand, how they clap, the ticket stub, the merchandise table -- and we respect that history, but we think it's important to, by acknowledging the previous model, design one's own rituals. I don't know how much we've accomplished our goals, as a utopia is necessarily an impossible thing to achieve. But we use all the tools at our disposal: video, Power Point, physical contact, Q&As, radical disturbance.

IYS: Is it easier or more challenging to work in an active partnership than it is to work as a solo artist? What's the give and take of your relationship?

Claire: Collaboration is always difficult, as it requires some level of ego sacrifice -- we're no exception. However, we are lucky enough to have shared many powerful experiences together -- most importantly the "Mystery Lights" for which our album is named, a paranormal light phenomena that occurs in the desert of Texas -- and we're able to draw on shared motivations for our work. After two years now of working together as YACHT, our creative process has refined itself into something very crystalline, very collaborative. We each have our strengths, and we divvy up work accordingly. Everything, in the end, has to come together, and when it does, it becomes larger than each of our personal egos or identities. It becomes YACHT.

IYS: Do you have plans to hit any big music festivals this year?

Jona: We are not currently at liberty to divulge that information.

IYS: If you had to record an album with nothing but a piano or an acoustic guitar, how do you think those songs would sound?

Jona: I think a fully acoustic YACHT album would still sound like a YACHT album. I really love working within limitations, actually. I made an album with my friend Lucky Dragons that was made entirely out of Nirvana samples.

IYS: What are the challenges of performing live without a full band? Are there certain shows you have to work especially hard to get a crowd going at the visual level? Do you still find room for spontaneity performing primarily with computers and electronics?

Claire: It's definitely more challenging than playing with traditional instrumentation, but when it works, it's very transcendent, because we've managed to make something transcendent and synergistic happen with very few elements -- a real alchemy. It's largely an experiment in navigating the energy of large groups of people and attempting to parlay that into a significant shared experience. We play so many shows in a year, however, that there is a point where the performance for us begins to feel repetitive and insincere, and that point we absolutely have to change it. We remix the songs, change the video, rearrange the show, experiment with new gestures and indoctrinations, and, most recently, we've recruited three new members to YACHT, who will now be touring with us under the name "YACHT & The Straight Gaze."

IYS: We know you have a tour coming up; will there be any new material on show there? What can you say about the prospects of a new YACHT record on the way?

Jona: We're taking three months off this summer to begin work on the next album, but it is a very nebulous concept to us at the moment.

IYS: What fellow musician you are familiar with has inspired you the most throughout your musical career? Who is someone you admire that you still are hoping to meet? And who is a hero to you that you'll never get the chance to meet?

Jona: The person I admire the most, I will never get to meet: Kurt Cobain. Nirvana is essentially the reason we're having this conversation today. I'm hoping one day I might be able to meet David Byrne or David Bowie. I am constantly inspired by my friend Adam Forkner, who makes music under the name of White Rainbow.

Claire: My heroes are all writers. And my greatest inspirations on a day to day basis are science fiction authors, the great subversive, marginal, psychedelic geniuses of the genre -- and most of the ones I'd like most to meet have already died: Philip K. Dick, Arthur C. Clarke, and Octavia Butler and Carl Sagan.