YESTERDAY

YACHT was born in 2002 in Portland, Oregon as a solo cross-disciplinary experiment for Jona Bechtolt, using technology to extend physical boundaries 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. In 2010, The Straight Gaze — Robert “Bobby Birdman” Kieswetter and Jeffrey “Jerusalem” Brodsky — rounded out the live presentation of all YACHT music.

TODAY

“If we cannot yet reconcile all opinions, Let us endeavor to unite all hearts.” -Robert Owen, 1832
YACHT is a Band, Belief System, and Business conducted by Jona Bechtolt and Claire L. Evans of Marfa, Texas and Portland, Oregon, USA. All people are welcome to become members of YACHT. Accordingly, YACHT is and always will be what YACHT is when YACHT is standing before you.
YACHT believes in reforming an adequate language by coining new words and examining the meaning of existing words. For example, Utopia means “No Place.” Thus YACHT understands its quest is in movement, not a resting point. For example, “I” is a story we tell ourselves. Thus YACHT seeks the undifferentiated collective experience.
YACHT understands that to feel part of the world is to be engaged in creative activity. However, creative output is powerless without contact with a spectator, who completes the creative act and brings it into contact with the world by registering its existence and interpreting its value.
YACHT believes art and spirituality are inseparable; both are concerned with the creation of something from nothing, with form without antecedent. The feeling or moment of creation is a kind of spiritual high that can be achieved by anyone with the willingness to transmute an idea into form. When we create something, we relive the first spark into consciousness of both the microcosm (ourselves) and the macrocosm (our universe). Art is ontological birth. No religious culture is without an image-making culture. In more ancient religions, the making of images is the spiritual act itself.
YACHT seeks to explore frontiers and to expand awareness of Extraterrestrial Intelligence (ETI). There is nothing marginal about acknowledging the greater possibility of life in the cosmos; it is chauvinistic, beyond the pale, to imagine otherwise.
YACHT believes that in the province of the mind, there are no limits. Every person is the master of their own neurological experience. Our minds contain the universe, by the act of comprehending it.
YACHT encourages the testing of these ideas in the laboratory of your own nervous system.
YACHT knows that to confront the world without ideas is to see the formless void.
YACHT encourages online dissemination of all things.
YACHT believes “Free Wi Fi” is not an advertisement of services, but a political statement.

TOMORROW

YACHT’s primary goal is to bring more physicality to its output, both in tangible objects for consumption and in communal places for people to gather. YACHT will continue to travel, speak, sing, give ontological birth, and seek to know the importance or insignificance of existence. YACHT and the YACHT Trust will strive to build a larger and larger community. The path will be long and strange.