20 Questions With Yacht

Yacht has announced their New Mystery Moods tour across North America to support their highly-acclaimed See Mystery Lights album. They will be playing in Toronto at WRONGBAR on March 4th.

They did us the pleasure of taking the Pink Mafia‘s 20 Questions With Rad People too:

1. What is your dream of happiness?

The whole driving impulse behind YACHT right now is to bring together a community of like-minded people and somehow make a home for them in the Far West Texas desert, in Marfa, where we lived while recording See Mystery Lights. An alliance, a homestead. The light in the desert is wide and and almost white on the desert plains, the agave cactus. It’s a very spiritual place for us, and we’d like to make a permanent commitment to that land.

2. Blonde or Brunette?

We like a little bit of both. Duality is one of our great interests: dark, light, one thing can’t exist without the other. We honor and respect the darkness all while choosing the path of the light. Jona is a brunette. I am a blonde. This is not without reason.

3. What Is the quality you like most in a man?

Femininity.

4. What do you fear most?

That spirituality is a mass delusion caused by some minute quirk of neurology. We also have nightmares about a dark, inscrutable mask of an alien’s face as it stands quietly in our bedroom doorway in the dead of night; the looming threat of abduction. Nothing is more frightening than the stone-cold other.

5. 808s or 909s?

Whatever is necessary to make the best music you can make. We make all our music with a consumer-level iMac computer, a $50 condenser microphone, and borrowed instruments; for us, it’s about as much as possible with as little as possible, and, furthermore, we believe the tools are essentially irrelevant. It’s about how you transcend the tools, make them invisible, and create the illusion that your music somehow predates you — that it was always there.

6. What’s your biggest regret?

That we can’t remember our own births.

7. What’s your fav bar or club in the world?

For YACHT, it’s not about place, it’s about what can be done in a place. We see shows as Temporary Autonomous Zones, pirate utopias, quick-dissolve anarchies to be constructed and taken apart by its constituents, the concert attendees. There are so many calcified rituals in the club: the stamping, the merchandise, the tickets, the way people hold themselves. Why not subvert those and create an experience that’s both temporary and new?

8. What’s the one thing you can’t you live without?

The Internet.

9. What are the 3 musicians dead or alive you’d like to see perform?

Kurt Cobain, Krist Novoselic, and Dave Grohl.

10. What is your favorite decade in music?

The 1980s gave us a perfect distillation of punk and aesthetics: California hardcore, the post-punk movement, the birth of independent music, the early shivers of grunge, the Talking Heads.

11. If you had to choose, would you rather go blind of deaf and why?

We would rather go deaf because it would put us in a position to make really interesting music. Can you imagine, a deaf band? Traveling and playing music that they’d never heard? Nothing could be more pure.

12. How old is too old?

Dead.

13. Where did you see yourself in 15 years?

We can’t say. We feel as though we’ve taken the first steps onto a long, winding path whose turns and obstacles remain obscured to us. It may lead us off the edge of the cliff, but we have faith that if we keep our heads down, work through the briar patches, and continue with light in our hearts, that it will take us up and over the mountain.

14. Who’s your hero?

Our heroes are many, as are our influences. Like everyone in this hyper-connected, self-navigating digital utopia we call the Western world, our minds are a sieve of millions of ephemera: music, images, colors, ideas, anxieties, connections. It all seeps in, and eventually we turn it around into cogent output that is profoundly inspired by the work of others without being derivative. Kurt Cobain, Luxirare, James Tiptree Jr./Alice Sheldon, Philip K. Dick, the science fiction writers of the New Wave, David Byrne, Brian Eno, Karl Lagerfeld, David Lynch, Yayoi Kusama, John C. Lilly, Aleister Crowley, Manly P. Hall…

15. What’s your favourite colour?

White because it contains all colors. And black because it doesn’t.

16. What song could you live without ever hearing again?

The song “Man, I Feel Like a Woman” by Shania Twain. This song is worthy of all the vitriol a person can muster. It is fucked on so many levels: musically, politically, aesthetically, sexually. It’s a nightmare. “The best thing about being a woman is the prerogative to have a little fun?” Might as well say, “The best thing about being a woman is that you don’t need to think.”

17. Metallica or Madonna?

Madonna.

18. What’s your most hated vice?

Intellectual laziness, the lack of curiosity about the world and one’s place in it. We have no sympathy for those who aren’t curious.

19. Who is the most tragic figure in history?

Vernon Wayne Howell, aka David Koresh, the ill-fated leader of the Branch Davidians. He was a rapturous leader in a fundamentalist vein that is pervasive in America today, before the conservative power machine realized that fundamentalist Christians were political allies. He and the rest of the Branch Davidians, women and children, were squashed like bugs by the FBI at Waco and then slandered posthumously in justification. David Koresh sought to live righteously, and in doing so led his followers into grotesque, unnecessary deaths at the hands of the Feds. Perhaps not the most tragic figure in history, but a parable about of the importance of communication, and very visible example of the propaganda poison we are constantly fed by our leaders and the media about offshoot spiritual groups.

20. What are the top three live shows you’ve seen in your life?

Jona’s first ever concert was the Melvins, the Breeders, and Nirvana. He fulfilled the “top live shows” category of existence before I even hit the ground, and now we don’t have to worry about it.