YACHT have always positioned themselves on the bleeding edge of the technological spectrum. The LA-by-way-of-Portland band has already made albums about the letdowns of the modern era, and looked climate change straight in the face. They’ve taken their proximity to Silicon Valley to heart perhaps moreso than any other band, and frontwoman Claire L. Evans has made a name for herself in the literary world writing about emerging science and technology for Wired, The Guardian, and Vice; the latter of which also finds her working in an editorial capacity.
A polymath’s polymath, Evans and bandmates Jona Bechtolt and Bobby Birdman took their tech fascination to an unprecedented level with their 2019 album Chain Tripping, a Death From Above Records release that saw the trio using AI and machine learning to direct the creation of the record from beginning to end. Almost two years to the date of their last appearance in Boston, YACHT brought their latest and most unique record to local standby Great Scott, packing the tiny dive with people eager to dance to old hits and new experiments.
While “machine learning” may mean a few different things to readers and listeners depending on what brands of sci-fi they consume, in the most general sense, it means feeding a program a plethora of inputs, in this case lyrics and instrumentals, and using the patterns it organically finds therein to create new outputs that are unique and unconstrained by the limits of human imagination. It’s a fascinating concept, and something that has been used to implement everything from societal boons such as transit optimization, to more concerning developments like facial recognition and mass surveillance.
Its applications are boundless, and often unexpected, and Evans proclaims proudly to the crowd: “We found the only ethical use of artificial intelligence – ART!” In the intimate eye of this developing technological storm, YACHT have been wringing new music from this emergent form of creativity. While computer science is often labeled (and libeled) as an emotionless and rigid pursuit, it’s far more open-ended than your average fictional hacker slamming keys on prime-time TV would suggest. Developing sub-fields like machine learning take computerized pursuits, already their own art form of problem-solving, to boundless new heights.
YACHT, true to their name (Young Americans Challenging High Technology), looked inward first, using AI to tear down patterns in their discography and music they loved, and then turned the program loose to generate new ideas, both instrumentally and lyrically, from those elemental building blocks. Then the band reentered to assemble those fragments into something more cohesive, although each song bears the mark of the “uncanny valley” – lyrics that sound vaguely human, but are missing the certain je ne sais quoi that would make them sound like normal speech. The band kept the fragments as-is during their reconstruction; that’s how Evans winds up singing lines like “Your teeth are all an ocean”, over patterns that also sound somewhat like the YACHT of yore, but with a difficult-to-place new twist.
Not only did the band put their album on full display, they elected to perform it in reverse, beginning with the slow burn and restrained bass line of ‘Little Instant’ and working backwards to the invitation of ‘(Downtown) Dancing’. It’s stunning how adept the machine is at creating grooves: the room was dancing enthralled to ‘Loud Light’, in the same way they would to YACHT classics like ‘Hard World’ – perhaps the catchiest song about veganism ever written – later in the night. ‘Loud Light’ contains some of the most potent lyrical content from the machine, assembling a hook that surpasses the efforts of most pop writers. “I’m so in love / I can feel it in my car / I can feel it in my heart / I can feel it so hard” Evans sings, the final line seeing her voice rise then fall between the so and the hard in a way that’s so infectiously catchy it’s hard to believe it’s algorithmic. Throughout the night, Bechtolt and Birdman switch between synths, guitar, and bass, using familiar tools to give life to the AI’s brand-new vision.
At the conclusion of the album, Evans pauses for a moment to address the crowd, the tiny beads of sweat on her forehead ceasing to move for just a moment. “That was Chain Tripping,” she says. “And this is what it’s about!” What follows is ‘I Thought the Future Would Be Cooler’, the title track of the band’s 2015 LP. It refers not only to the failure of our future to deliver the silver sheen of Jetsons-style flying cars and enough foodstuffs to feed the world, but also the reality that the same mechanisms that brought listeners the record they just heard are used to the detriment of many people, especially minorities, in public places across every country wealthy enough to possess the technology.
It’s not quite the utopia the fiction authors of the 50s and 60s posited; in fact, it’s trending the opposite way. The band opens their encore with ‘Dystopia’, a vision of an Earth ravaged by climate change whose childless populace nihilistically surrenders. “Let the motherfucker burn,” they declare, in one final dance to the death, an unkind but not unrealistic vision of what could be the ultimate fate of our planet in the real world.
The final track of the night is ‘Psychic City’, a YACHT classic that recalls the oblique imagery and narration of The Talking Heads’ ‘Once in a Lifetime’ and filters it through the ponderous lyricism of LCD Soundsystem. While now it seems a relic of a more innocent time in the band’s songwriting, it’s undeniably pristine and enduring. “Where you been, darlin’, darlin’? We’re holding this moment for you.” To take that lyric from more than 10 years ago and apply it to now, YACHT are holding this moment of technological singularity in their hands here in 2020, using it to create beauty in what may ultimately be a technological twilight.
Review and photos by Collin Heroux
