YACHT is the brainchild of ex-Blow member and current-MacBook Air "Airmail" co-inventor Jona Bechtolt. He lives in Portland, where he co-founded the blogging web community Urban Honking. Bechtolt's performed at various art museums and galleries, is a big proponent of PowerPoint, and has remixed and been remixed aplenty. His most recent collection is 2007's I Believe In You. Your Magic Is Real.
Remixes can be a dime a dozen (or a penny a laptop), but after listening to YACHT's tweaks of Stereolab and Ratatat tunes for a couple days, we figured they were more than worth posting. Jona Bechtolt's revamping of Ratatat's LP3 track "Mirando" transforms the song into a new entity, layering different noodles, bleeps, and percussion while stripping away a chunk of the instrumentation and replacing what's vacated with deep-voiced hip-hop reps about a sibling's artillery. (Goes well with Ratatat's explosive video for the original.) As far as Stereolab, Bechtolt ups "Self Portrait With 'Electric Brain'"'s dance-floor factor without losing the space-age bachelor cool.
Echoing Slate's out-of-date Portland exposé from this past fall, MTV's followed the momentum of their Brooklyn 2008 piece with a feature on PDX. What we learn: There are a lot of bands who live there, it's still relatively cheap, it rains, there are coffee shops (one of which used to employ the Thermals' Hutch Harris). We also discover Portland invented basement shows, organic food, and that many of the city's bands exist outside the "national and international blog-rock scene." Except for those who don't. Faces you'll recognize belong to Colin Meloy, M. Ward, Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks, YACHT, Menomena, Panther, Valet, White Rainbow, Au, etc. There are less familiar faces, too, like Eat Skull, White Fang, Southern Belle, Fist Fite, etc. It's fun to watch, maybe a bit long.
In addition to shooting a ton of performances in Austin last week, we subjected many of our favorite acts to Texas music trivia. You saw part one. In this follow-up, we test the smarts of Islands, My Brightest Diamond, Peter Morén, The Cribs, YACHT, and others. Shea Hess lends a hand as our quizmaster, and everyone learns a lot thanks to her. Thanks again to our SXSW video team of Jon McMillan, Raphael Rodriguez, and Matt Neatock. Also, good job Rogue Wave!
The people of Austin are nice enough to welcome thousands (and thousands) of vagabond music fans into their city for a few days each year, so we decided to pay their stomping ground homage with a friendly game of Texas Music Triva. Keeping the music theme airtight, we had our friend Shea Hess ask a number of indie luminaries including Simian Mobile Disco, Wye Oak, YACHT, My Brightest Diamond, and the Ringers questions about the Lone Star state's music history. Grab a Shiner and play along at home.
Best response: "True in the sense that it's false." Thank you, the Ringers.
Giving us something better than a penny to pick up, the always kind Portland beat-tweaker Jona Bechtolt's posted a bunch of free YACHT and Blow instrumentals over at his site with the following note:
I just made instrumentals of YACHT and The Blow for people to download, karaoke, chop up, reuse, sell, or whatever. Happy Holidays!
Thanks, Jona. Before you dig in, though, please watch the following for inspiration.
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