WE'RE ALL-ONE OR NONE.

YACHT's Disco Worship: Music for Meditative Dancing was originally released on the fantastic Portland, OR, based tape-label Gnar Tapes and Shit. On the occasion of the tape's sold-out edition, we'd like to offer you this hour-long mix for free, now, online. It's a concise unit of rapturous, ego-eclipsing dance music framed loosely around the idea of the spirit, ranging from rambling Bollywood numbers praising mighty Krishna to the hippie-creed of Father Yod and Eden Abhez, all backed with a disco beat. It is the product of months of research on "spiritual" music, and was more than a little inspired by Dan Graham's amazing film Rock My Religion, which equates the music-induced spiritual fervor of the Shakers and the fire and brimstone of Puritan dogma with early rock n' roll idolatry, Patti Smith, and punk rock. You can watch Rock my Religion for free, here on Ubu Web, always an excellent resource.

We're fascinated with the common ground of underground spirituality and underground music. After all, both are motivated by the desire to create something more real, special, and rare than what is being presented by the mainstream cultural machine.

Still from Dan Graham's "Rock My Religion."

The mainstream is quick to use words like "cult" to marginalize offshoot religious groups, in the same way that it once used the word "punk" to marginalize a certain music subculture. And yet there is something richly American and powerfully human about people who strike off to create their own religious or cultural identities -- everywhere from starting hippie communes and having religious visions to starting a band -- and we really respect that tradition. After all, the music concert is a series of rituals just as the religious service is; we come together in the dark club, following a sequence of understood rules (hand-stamp, coat check, merch table, posture), and we hope to experience transcendence, to have synergistic and communal experience worth remembering.

When it goes well, our fervor can be metaphysical. Let us, like the Shakers, dance ecstatically.

Disco Worship: Music for Meditative Dancing track list:

We're ecstatic to be touring with LCD Soundsystem again.

YACHT never changes. Not really. This is because we've defined YACHT as being anything we set our minds to. YACHT is the music, but it is also all our peripheral projects: it's design, writing, brand, business, performance, gesture, video. With all of our creative work dedicated to the larger header of YACHT, we never have to worry about "fearing change," because everything is moving all the time. Or rather, we move madly through an unchanging world.

As the great poet Ezra Pound once wrote:

"And the days are not full enough
And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field mouse
Not shaking the grass."

That said, we've made a significant change and we'd like to address it. We've added three people to the live incarnation of YACHT: Rob "Bobby Birdman" Kieswetter, Jeffrey "Jerusalem" Brodsky, and D. Reuben Snyder, of Rob Walmart. These three will be known as the Straight Gaze, and our performances with them as YACHT and the Straight Gaze.

Rearranging the band, for us, is not altering the spirit of YACHT, only the form by which it is delivered. The decision to add The Straight Gaze came as our changes usually do -- every six months, we feel the need to completely reinvent the way YACHT is presented to the world. We added Claire L. Evans two years ago, and since have remixed, rearranged, recomposed all of our performances countless times. The Straight Gaze are here to help, to continue the projection of constant experimentation, evolution, and change. We hope you will love them as much as we do.

We would like to take this moment to clarify one point: the addition of the Straight Gaze isn't about becoming a "full" band. We never felt that the one, and then two person incarnations of YACHT were ever in any sense incomplete, or un-full. We do not want, or intend, to become more palatable or "rock and roll" as a result of this change. The Straight Gaze are a psychic extension of us and YACHT will always be fucked-up, transcendent, and weird. We hope that's OK with you.

As for the name, yes, we are aware that it sounds like "Straight Gays." This is intentional, and for us the name works on multiple levels: one, being that it stands for direct communication, an unfaltering gaze from us to you, and vice-versa. Two, that we are aware that being gazed upon is fundamental to the nature of being performers, and that we accept your gaze as long as it is honest, unmediated. Three, that we consider ourselves to be "straight gays" politically, and we'd like to own the fact that there is, sometimes, speculation about our genders and sexual orientations (i.e. men in Texas yelling "fags" at us, etc). We're happy with that ambiguity. Straight gaze, straight gays, seriousness, humor, subtext: it's all there.

Y.a.t.S.G. will be touring extensively in 2010, across the great Canadian expanses, down the East Coast of the United States of America, then West, then back up to our home in Portland, Oregon. We will also take on Mexico, Colombia, and Europe, which we will tackle with our friends, LCD Soundsystem; we are the plastic yin-yang bracelet to their serene mastery of the I Ching. We strive only to complement and complicate them and theirs.

Please come see us.

Photo by Claire, taken in Xining, China in November 2009.

Suitcases, airplane meals, security, layovers, running to catch trains, buses, taxis, strangers holding signs with our name on it, sheets, hotel room shampoo, smells, signs in foreign languages, sweat, communication breakdowns, ordering anxiety, granola bars, plastic bags, sunglasses, computer problems, wi-fi, coats, greenrooms of varying shapes, sizes, scents, and temperatures, fruit plates, untouched six-packs of Kronenburg (or Victoria Bitter, or Becks, or Chinese and Korean beers we can't remember), surly sound dudes, merch tables, sticky floors, magazines, makeup, bathroom stalls...then the show starts.

That's when we enter the Temporary Autonomous Zone. In China, Korea, the many corners of Europe, Australia, New Zealand, in the USA, or in Brazil: no matter how out of place we feel or how far we are from home, once the show starts, there are the kids. Some are very much kids, young and excited. Some aren't physically kids at all, but very much at heart. Some are overwhelmingly cool, fashionable, and "on the level." No matter which kind of kids they are, it's always a relief to see them. If we've learned one thing from touring every corner of this world this year, it's that "the underground" is a consistent phenomenon, one which varies only slightly in color and style from place to place. Kids are kids, and seeing them in Korean basement clubs, Chinese steampunk bars, or German discos is like stepping into an international embassy of adjusted normality -- or, rather, into the home lodge of a broad-reaching secret society with the power to change reality.

China proved to us that the temporary autonomous zone thrives even with censored Internet.

We've always felt that the performer-audience divide is the greatest problem YACHT has to overcome. By this we mean the vast and seemingly uncrossable boundary between us and them, the people who come to the show. We hate the old idea that "the artist sacrifices talent for money, and the audience sacrifices money for talent," because it implies that once tickets are paid, it is the audience's role to be passive, to accept what is presented to them as a return on investment. If the performance isn't what was expected -- "hey, I paid good money for this!" Of course, money is an inescapable part of the interaction, but we try to do everything we can to render that division between stage and floor transparent, if not annihilated. There aren't many existing models for us to follow, because this very separation is what defines performance, what distills a personality into a persona.

We didn't know what to expect from South Korea. New lands bring an equal measure of promise and trepidation.

We see the show as a pirate utopia, a radically demilitarized zone, an oasis of separateness from the foreign world outside. YACHT presents it, of course, and leads the way, but our ultimate goal is for the YACHT show to be a work of art without an author. From the first step inside the room, the audience should feel as though they are members, not watchers. It's a society of its own, a completely ephemeral secret society with its own spontaneously generated codes of behavior, which differ from show to show. It's owned equally by everyone in attendance.

And it doesn't matter where it takes place.

The Ute: a special breed of truck/car hybrid in Australia that we became obsessed with photographing.

It's with this in mind that we leave the hectic touring of 2009 and step into the fresh new reality of 2010. Schooled, humbled, and renewed. In the future, we will no longer be alone: when YACHT comes to your town, YACHT will not be a two-person commando of experience, but a larger system, a heavier and less predictable experiment in vibe control. Open the doors and prepare to participate.

Some guy displaying the poster as posters are commonly displayed on the internet.

We are thrilled to announce the completion of our most recent "supplementary materials" project. As you may (or may not) know, we have been steadily working on an output of non-musical materials over the course of the last few months, materials which enhance and complement the appreciation of the YACHT worldview. There was the Anthem of the Trinity mixtape, a concise compilation of conscious and subconscious musical influences. Then there came our book, The Secret Teachings of the Mystery Lights: A Handbook for Overcoming Humanity and Becoming Your Own God, a primer to our ideology that is available, at this point, only person-to-person at YACHT concerts. Now comes the YACHT Catalogue of Influences 2007-2009.

The YACHT Catalogue of Influences 2007-2009 is a massive, high-quality print poster overlaid with a subtle two-foot trompe-l'oeil varnish that archives, in totality, all of the non-musical influences which went into the primordial soup of our current philosophy and aesthetic. These run the gamut from Star Trek to Nikola Tesla, the Branch Davidian Seventh Day Adventists, the "Sacred Mirror" paintings of Alex Grey, Aleister Crowley, Raoul Vaneigem's The Revolution of Everyday Life, the teachings of UNARIUS, the films of Pier Paolo Pasolini, and the Whole Earth Catalog -- to mention but a few. All of the influences are meticulously catalogued, reproduced in full-color, and handily indexed.

The embossed and hand-numbered 2.3" x 3' spot-varnished poster is for sale now at the Marriage Records website and comes shipped in a heavy-duty triangular tube stamped with the YACHT insignia. Click below to order:

We are particularly attached to this project because it speaks volumes of our personal truth about what it means to make art in this age of hyper-connectivity: even while working in a void in Marfa, Texas, where we lived while making See Mystery Lights, the endless ephemera of creation filters through your consciousness until one morning you find yourself with a handful of crystallized ideas inspired directly by the work of those who came before you. Like Buckminster Fuller before us, we consider ourselves to be generalists. In this way, we save ourselves from obsolescence. A band, after all, is an evolutionary entity. It breathes and lives like a creature. And overspecialization, in the animal kingdom, is what causes extinction. The world is large and full of mystery, as well as more interesting and beautiful things than two people can ever fully absorb. This poster is a small slice of it, our gift to you.

Thank you to our good friends behind Veneer Magazine for their invaluable help conceptualizing, laying out, and printing this poster.

The marquee at Pomona's beautiful Fox Theater by Krystal Eileen on Flickr.

We've already established that Marfa, Texas is a special place for us, right? Right. Almost two years ago, we moved to Marfa to write and record our album, See Mystery Lights. We chose Marfa because of the Lights, but also because the desolate and isolated Far West Texas desert was an attractive recording space for us. In reality, this isolation was a mirage. Our short time in Marfa ended up being the most social time of our young lives. Bonfires, daytrips, and parties punctuated our time there, but the ONE night we chose to stay home turned out to be the very same night that the Yeah Yeah Yeahs were in town and inexplicably partying with our Texan friends. The next day we heard how about how nice they were, and how they too were recording a new album in Texas, three and a half hours away near El Paso. We wrote it off as mere coincidence, thinking our paths would probably never cross again, for all time.

Since then, we've returned to Marfa a handful of times, and will undoubtedly continue to do so until we end up setting up there permanently. On our last trip there, we received an email from our North American booking agent with a request from the aforementioned "Yeahs" asking if we'd like to tour with them starting in a couple weeks. We were ecstatic. At first the offer was for a string of East Coast dates, but preexisting commitments transformed that into a West Coast tour starting in our hometown of Portland, Oregon. We were doubly ecstatic and again humbled by the magic and mystery of Marfa.

We're not sure exactly how you interpret YACHT as a band, but with the exception of The YACHT Trust, we are a very small and almost exclusively independent operation. We've received more critical acclaim for our new album than we ever could have crossed our fingers for, and we're on an internationally revered record label, but that hasn't changed the fact that we still do long-haul tours in our VW Golf, and make everything -- the music, the video elements, the companion literature, the design of our websites and merchandise -- all on our own. This approach has been crafted over the years by a healthy mix of plain old economics, and needing to control as much in our lives as possible, down to the details.

So when the gentle giants of the YYYs showed interest in us and offered us up to their audiences, we were deeply honored.

As could be expected, this tour was awesome beyond description. Not only were the shows incredible -- Yeah Yeah Yeahs fans are very excited, kind, and accepting people -- but everything else about it was like a dream. We did it all. We swam in Lake Shasta, partied in Salt Lake City, limboed under a clothing rack, buffeted in Las Vegas, and visited the Apple Campus outside of San Franciso (and saw Steve Jobs).

Above all else, we got to play with The Breeders in an epic Grecian amphitheater outdoors in Los Angeles. Thanks to the Yeahs' good-natured insistence, and in spite of our nerves, we got pulled in to their room to meet them, too. Of course, they were lovely people, and very impressed by Jona's white suit. Here's a group photo from the end of the night. All of which is crazy, since The Melvins, The Breeders, and Nirvana were Jona's very first big rock concert.

What else do you want to know about the Yeah Yeah Yeahs? They are stand-up people. They have great hair. They were unprecedently kind to us (thanks for the cupcakes, guys!). They are an insane live band. We have nothing but the most profound gratitude to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, their incredible fans, and everyone involved with this Y-heavy tour. We never thought our paths would cross again, and we were fools -- the West Texas spirit is in us all, and will carry us all together across time.

YACHT will remain on tour throughout the rest of 2009, starting with Europe, a pair of shows in Southern California, China and Hong Kong, a pair of shows in Florida, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand, and more. If you'd like to host a special YACHT event in the future, inquire below:

✍ Ryan Craven of The Agency Group (North America)
☎ +1 310-385-2800

✍ Andreas Oberschelp at Puschen Booking (Europe)
☎ +49 (0)30 7022 5001

✍ Andy Duggan at Primary Talent International (UK, Australia, & Japan)
☎ +44 (0) 20 7400 4500

The original sketch by Boyd Elder for the See Mystery Lights album cover.

While making See Mystery Lights we were nightly experiencing something like direct revelation, the Marfa Mystery Lights. The Lights spoke directly to us, guiding us, and were our sole inspiration in the making of not only the album, but also our physical and digital presentations, our new performances, and all of our forthcoming companion releases. This experience also shaped and solidified our belief system, which we've now outlined, explained, and started to distribute person-to-person, peer-to-peer, at events, and soon online.

The Lights were so overwhelming and consuming that we weren't afforded the luxury of being able to truly process our musical output until the entire album was complete. Upon reflecting afterwards, we decided to try and draw parallels to music we were familiar with, music that we had grown up with, and music that subconsciously shaped our musical interpretation of the Lights. After making this musical influence map of sorts, we discussed back and forth at length, concerned that this level of detail might remove the hard-earned mystery from the album. After all, it was a similar mystery (the Lights) which captured our attention back in 2005, and inspired us to move to Marfa to work under its presence. This sort of mystery is rare in our age of immediate access to endless and open information, myth-busting, and the scientific explanation and debunking of what little paranormal phenomena remain in the world.

Ultimately, we decided that the path of accessibility and openness was the right path to take. We've compiled, edited, mixed, and slightly fucked-up a continuous mix of songs you may or may not know, ranging from Arthur Russell to INXS, the Talking Heads to Bad Brains, from gnostic dance party to deep meditation (and back). We've been selling it at shows exclusively and are now very excited to offer it to the rest of the world via our old friend and the first label to house YACHT, States Rights Records.

Use this mixtape freely (along with all of the other See Mystery Lights companion releases) to better understand YACHT, and possibly yourself, a little more clearly.

Buy the Anthem of the Trinity CD via States Rights Records for $5:

Anthem of the Trinity Track list:

Our next offering is something we hope is of use, or at least enjoyment, to you. We have decided, in the wake of this spirit of openness, to release the instrumental tracks of See Mystery Lights for free via the Free Music Archive, which is rich with Creative Commons-licensed music for the people.

We feel that the draconian enforcements of the major record labels on third-party users of music are shameful and deeply inappropriate to the times in which we live. These instrumentals are free to use for all non-commercial purposes, including (but not limited to): karaoke performances, YouTube soundtracks, student films, personal analysis, atmospheric music, cover versions, chopping and screwing, or just to listen to if you don't enjoy YACHT's vocal performances.

Included are all the songs off of See Mystery Lights, excluding the A Cappella version of "Psychic City" for obvious reasons. These are available to stream and/or download under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license.

If you would like to license a YACHT song for commercial purposes, please contact Jeff Pachman at the Domino Publishing Company.

Feel free to comment and request stems, splits, tracks, or files for a specific song if you want to make a YACHT remix.

Unused still taken from the Psychic City (Voodoo City) video by Judah Switzer.

Two years ago, while traveling through the West Texas desert on tour, we experienced firsthand a paranormal phenomenon called the Marfa "Mystery Lights." This experience was a catalyst, and we soon moved to Marfa, Texas, to work and develop our already-acute interest in religion, ritual, and mystery.

As a result of this research, the "Psychic City" video depicts us performing religious rituals from all eras of human spirituality. Some will be familiar to viewers — the eucharist, for example — while others may remain obscure. Those who think that this video is an old-fashioned love story between Good and Evil are only partially correct: we protest the stigma of "occultism" and see the Left and Right-Hand paths as being simply two roads through the same woods.

The ceremonies seen in the video are done in honor of the Mystery Lights themselves and their continuing influence on our creative output. Now that this video has been released to the world, we can all be witnesses to whether or not such rituals do, in fact, work, and what they can mean to us.

The "Psychic City" video was directed by Judah Switzer, who worked with YACHT previously on the video for "Summer Song." It was filmed, partially, in the desert near Mosier, Oregon, on a RED One Digital Cinema camera. When Judah first presented us with the concept for "Psychic City," he couldn't remember if it was dream or reality; much as every change in doctrine in the Mormon Church comes from direct revelation, which takes precedence over learned consideration of the status-quo, Judah embraced a revelation and made it the word. He traversed the bridge from the unreal to the real.

A full bibliography, as well as an annotated list of references and rituals, is available to any interested parties. The YACHT "Catalogue of Inspirations 2007-2009," and The Secret Teachings of the Mystery Lights: A Guide to Overcoming Humanity and Becoming Your Own God, both supplementary materials to this video, will be available to purchase online and at official YACHT events in the near future.

We wish to emphasize that this film in no way suggests an affiliation with any religious organization, nor does it aim to rebuke them. The title card — which states that we do not endorse practice of the occult — is something of a false truth, in homage to the late Michael Jackson. We encourage education in all matters, and the choice of one's own path. We should never be afraid to read and think about those things which the mainstream establishment might label outré; there is value in all ideas.

For us, there is profound value in symbolism, too, and we used it heavily in the "Psychic City" video. Mythology is full of stories, rituals, battles, and romances, which serve as placeholders for the great philosophies of the ancient world. We must use this symbolic language in order to keep it alive. In the words of Manly P. Hall, "symbolism is the language of the Mysteries; in fact it is the language not only of mysticism and philosophy but of all of Nature...every form existing in the diversified sphere of being is symbolic of the divine activity by which it is produced."

Invaluable assistance was provided by the genius Ryann Bosetti, who styled and dressed us, Guy Wagner, our cinematographer, Bernadette Spear, our producer, Jordan Karr-Morse for gaffing, Emily Baker of Sword+Fern for the jewelry, Brian Lichtenberg for lending us clothes, Sarah Meadows for the still photography, and Nile Hagen for everything else.

Rich Jensen's Two Million Years from 1987 (K Records).

This is the story of the song "Psychic City," the first single from our forthcoming album See Mystery Lights, and it starts with a man named Rich Jensen.

Rich is a very special person in the evolution of YACHT.

I met Rich in 2004, when I was 23 or 24. He was living in my hometown of Astoria, on the Oregon coast, where he had been putting on shows. After he'd put on a show for my friends Thanksgiving and Mount Eerie in an actual fishing net maker's old shed, I asked him to help me with Catch That Beat, a small music festival I was organizing in (and for) Astoria. In 2005 and 2006, Rich organized a series of "book tours" for his publishing house, Clear Cut Press. He brought Claire and me with him to the East coast and West, where we did videos and Power Point performances under the name "We Two and the Universe."

Rich is a friend and a fan. He wrote "Psychic City" (his version is actually called "Voodoo City") in 1987, for his Two Million Years cassette, his second for K Records. Two Million Years is a surreal mix of field recordings and tone-poem "songs" (Rich thought "songs" were stupid at the time), and it's been a huge influence for us in terms of sheer concept and unembellished honesty.

Once we both heard the recording of "Voodoo City" and had the pleasure of seeing Rich perform it on multiple occasions in the woods, in the desert, and on the astral plane, respectively, we wanted to personally live inside of the world and extend its life in the only way we know how. Which, I guess, is to repackage and reanimate it into a subversive damaged zombie pop banger.

We're very proud of this time-travelling collaboration.

We've always been very excited to share our influences. We're going to release a carefully-crafted mix-tape soon of all the songs and "songs" that inspired See Mystery Lights. This story of "Psychic City" is the beginning. Here are all the fragments that came together to make this particular shell for the immortal body of the "song:"

Here's the original version: Rich Jensen - Voodoo City (4 MB MP3)

Here's our instrumental version: YACHT - Psychic City (Instrumental) - (4 MB MP3)

The synth in Althea & Donna's Uptown Top Ranking inspired the synth in the bridge: YACHT - Psychic City (Bridge Synth) - (612 KB MP3)

The bubble-pop/iChat sound featured throughout R Kelly's TP.3 Reloaded album (including the epic "Trapped in the Closet" series) inspired the beat in the verses: YACHT - Psychic City (Verse Beat) (326 KB MP3)

The ascending guitar "solo" and false ending are references to Brian Eno's "Baby's On Fire" off of one my favorite records of all-time, Here Come The Warm Jets.

I think our pitched-down version of the "HOOAH" parts were subconsciously inspired by the skits on Outkast's Stankonia: YACHT - Psychic City (Hooah) (461 KB MP3)

All of this might feel a little early, but after Pitchfork received a promo copy of See Mystery Lights they wrote and asked us if they could premiere "Psychic City" a full two months before our album is formally released in the US (July 28th), and we agreed. As you may know, promo copies of albums have to go out to the press up to three months before their release, in order to give writers time to review them -- this a model that's based on print media, where magazine issues are written and laid out months in advance.

Now, if we had it our way we'd be releasing our records as soon as they were "finished" (we believe our music to be a living document), but there are all kinds of rules to this game that bands of our size must follow if we want to it to be received worldwide or even try to sell our music in its packaged form.

So, Pitchfork told us they wanted to premiere "Psychic City" before the album "inevitably leaks" (which is, incidentally, an inevitable product of sending out promo copies to press). That kind of honesty is exciting. We are aware that we no longer have any real control over the dissemination of our music. We are also excited about this, and the future path of See Mystery Lights. We invite you all in to walk it with us.

As an added bonus, we've been blessed by Rich with Two Million Years in its entirety as one continuous MP3. Download it here: Rich Jensen - Two Million Years - (34 MB MP3) UPDATE: This download has expired. Gnar Tapes will be rereleasing Two Million Years on cassette!

PS- Watch this episode of the exquisite series, Soft Focus, with Calvin Johnson if you'd like to know a little bit about K Records.

PPS- Kanye West likes Psychic City!?

Photo from the House of Blues in New Orleans by Josh Brasted.

Immediately after our Australian tour we flew to Las Vegas, which was a pretty incredible way to experience returning to what is supposed to be your "home country." Las Vegas is a complicated place and our feelings regarding it are similarly complicated. We love its absurdity. We love Ronald's Donuts (link). We love the kids of Pan De Sal and their surrounding anarcho-political dance party milieu. We love the buffet at the Wynn. Criss Angel's collaborative bowel movement with Cirque du Soleil, which is contractually obligated to be infecting the Vegas showscape for the next ten years: not so much.

After Las Vegas, we departed on a two-week run of the East, Midwest, and South with Charlift, almost exactly one year after we'd seen them last.

We first met Chairlift on a rainy April night in 2008, when we played together at Bard College's SMOG garage-cum-venue. It was love at first sight, and we told you about how much we loved their song Planet Health on this very blog, as well as every person we encountered in the following days while their parting gift of a burned CD was in our possession. Since then they've released and re-released an album, landed a song in an iPod commercial, and generally become Big Time Ballers (BTBs). We had so much fun on tour with them that we took practically zero pictures or video. Instead, perhaps, we shall just describe a few memorable moments as best we can.

Memorable moments:

A sweaty, packed, fantastic show at Schuba's in Chicago that really set the tone for the whole tour. Claire was later described as a "Wiccan Annie Lennox" in Venus magazine's review of the show. We ask you: isn't Annie Lennox already the Wiccan Annie Lennox? Also, we did Da Stanky Legg:

At our St. Louis show, Chairlift's manager Molly turned 25 and we celebrated by throwing chocolate cake in everyone's faces, inviting everyone to come dance on stage and then for an hour after the show, and running around like idiots in the Washington University basement. Below, behold Jona's homage dance to Molly's birthday.

Spray-painting the inside of a Houston apartment and freestyling with the whole Chairlift crew and their super-nice new friend Solange Knowles.

Our first-ever rooftop hot tub party after our show in New Orleans. BTB!

City after city, time after time, let it be known that Chairlift burns the candle at both ends. We love you, guys.

Love,
YACHT

P.S. My Dude.

Hangin' tough at the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary outside of Brisbane. On Flickr.

The undeniable highlight of our entire Australian experience was our time spent at the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary outside of Brisbane. We took a "koala cruise" (boat) to get there. Lone Pine has around 200 koalas, 199 of whom are sleeping in eucalyptus trees at any given time, because koalas sleep all day. The kangaroos, however, played hard-to-get.

After meeting the koalas, we met Pharrell Williams (and Fam-Lay), which, despite being less cuddly, was just as good. The zenith of this celebrity-meeting experience came when the three of us (Jona, Claire, and Steve) were casually watching N.E.R.D. from the side of the festival stage, right up against the fenced-in crowd, when Pharrell pointed at us and motioned for us to get up on the stage. We made the classic "who, us?" gesture and turned around to see if someone was behind us. He made three fingers at us (one for each of us) and emphatically motioned again, so we ran up and stood on the sidelines of the stage and watched the rest of the show right "up in it." Midway through the show, Pharrell took out his in-ear monitors, ran over to Claire, and asked her how to pronounce our band name before returning to the stage and giving us a shout-out in front of 25,000 people.

UNREAL.

We also discovered the new axiom "Rappers love Stevie," which was proven again and again over the course of our Australian tour, particularly when Steve sat next to Fam-Lay on the plane and listened to brand-new-never-been-heard mixes of his tracks on his iPod. Steve, acting as an interim manager and hype guy for YACHT, suggested to Fam-Lay that YACHT do a remix. We haven't acted on this yet, still being too star-struck, but if you want to hear a YACHT remix of a Fam-Lay track, please hit up Fam-Lay's Myspace and let it be known.

Immediately after the festival show in Sydney. On Flickr by Steve Schroeder.

Australia, we are finally back in you!

We're touring with a large and hectic festival called Future Music, and playing two shows with our festival-mates CSS on the side. Different cities, same bands -- and same DJs, canned mixed drinks, lanyards, glow sticks, mud, and heaps of profoundly toned shirtless Paul Oakenfold fans.

TOUR GOAL #1: Convert as many people as possible.

TOUR GOAL #2: Meet Pharrell Williams.

On a serious note, we've been looking forward to visiting Australia and learning about the Dreamtime. Hopefully, by the end of this trip, we will have had the opportunity to talk with many people about our ideas.

We started our voyage in Melbourne, after flying from L.A. with our main man Steve Schroeder (A.K.A. "Dod" A.K.A. "Doddi" A.K.A. Dundee" A.K.A. "Mr Bitch") in tow. Steve was gracious enough to spiritually replace our scheduled new touring member Adam Forkner as the third vertex of the YACHT Triangle. In Melbourne, our amazing friends we-don't-deserve Kellie and Cameron took us on a thorough, secret, 10-point tour of city sights, which took us from an 88-story experience called THE EDGE to an Aussie Rules Football or "Footie" Footy game, ending with some comprehensive karaoke. Thank you, guys, for consistently being awesome (and very tan).

Then we played a show in Melbourne with CSS at the Prince of Wales, which was a very nice place. The show was great for us, except that Claire hurt her ears with our music.

From Melbourne, we hopped on a Qantas flight (incidentally, Qantas is one of the world's great airlines, the only airline whose flights and food we actually look forward to) to Sydney for our first Future Music Festival show. We rode buggies around the festival grounds (a giant multi-lane horse racecourse) and played to some very enthusiastic people in mustaches and hard-hats. After the show, our buggy broke down in the middle of a field and we hung out with the racecourse maintenance men and talked about the Australian Football League, which Steve (Dundee) is now very involved with.

Sydney is still very beautiful.

The next day we took a 5-hour flight to Perth, the most isolated city in the world. Perth was having some kind of crazy heat-wave. We watched N*E*R*D from the side of the stage, saw two dozen kids jump the fences of the festival, and told as many people as possible that everything was just "Perthect." There was another music festival happening in Perth that day; Jona saw Trent Reznor in the hotel elevator.

Now we're back in Sydney with a day off and another show with CSS looming on the horizon. Thanks to Qantas, Cameron & Kellie, Gus, Daniel Bogan, the Ruby Suns, Matrix, CSS, and everyone who's come out to the shows thus far. Aussie rules!

Google led me to Luke Roberts' pirate wallpaper series.

As you may know, YACHT has encountered some contestation recently on the issue of software piracy. We are not embarrassed or defensive about it, and we make absolutely no claim that our positions regarding piracy are definitive: they are only ours. Relative to the long and ancient tradition of actual piracy, the ins and outs of stealing software is a new issue, and it warrants extensive, respectful discussion. Let's look long and hard to what is happening to the Pirate Bay, what has happened to sites like TV Links and OiNK, and may we come to know that the book on this has not yet been written.

We'd like to take a moment to thank everyone that has written and voiced their support for us. We are literally nothing without you. As for everyone else, we're excited to be involved in this conversation, and, as always, invite you to join it.

Speaking the truth is not glorification. If more people spoke truthfully we’d be able to move forward at much greater speeds. YACHT attempts levels of honesty that may make people uncomfortable. These feelings of discomfort are generally the reasons we write blog posts like this one. It helps to sort out our feelings, make declarative statements, and get feedback from our peers.

Software is pirated. The most pirated software belongs to the most successful software company: Microsoft. This is not justification, it’s just the nature of digital media. For those of us that are comfortable enough with computers to have the knowledge to find and use pirated material it all seems so easy, but the majority of people do not, and the path of least resistance for them is to purchase it. The system is not perfect, but it works.

We don’t have all the answers, but we’re willing to be the catalyst for a dialogue about this amazing digital world we live in. If that means we have to be seen as the villain on occasion, so be it. But we would ask that you look at your own hard drive and not judge us too harshly. We have never met a computer-savvy person who does not have some pirated content. Never.

On Marfa Public Radio with ex-touring member Adam Forkner. Photo by Evan George.

We're sorry to announce that we have to cancel our upcoming performance at The Roxy in Los Angeles this Sunday. We love The Roxy, but irreconcilable creative differences with a new touring member have triggered the need for rigorous internal reorganization. We will emerge from this reorganization with a fresh vision, and we hope to share that with you, dear readers, soon.

We had been eagerly anticipating making a special announcement of the addition of our third touring member, Adam Forkner, on this website. However, this expansion ended before it began. We have no hard feelings for Adam; may he continue bravely along his own path.

We'll come back to Los Angeles and play The Roxy soon. We apologize for any trouble this may have caused you. If you have any more questions or concerns, please feel free to contact us as trust@teamyacht.com.

Adam Forkner squishing us near Lajitas, TX. Photo by Curtis Knapp.

A year ago we were building fires, doing chores, and making new music and visions out in the Far West Texas desert, under the bright sunlight and the otherworldly Night Lights. Now, 12 months later, we've gone all around the world and back to Marfa, TX, to present the music we recorded out there to a conclave of strangers and friends alike. This time around we brought White Rainbow and a crew of ghost riders with us to introduce them not only to this desolate and psychedelic part of the world, but also to give them a first hand experience of the transcendent shit we've been rambling on about since we left.

In addition to returning to our temporary 2008 home of Marfa, Texas, we were blessed with the opportunity of a second desert-lizard show in the "ghost town" of Terlingua. Vance Knowles, the music and film director of Ballroom Marfa (the arts organization that brought us to Texas) called us a week before we landed in Marfa and asked us if we wanted to drive down to Terlingua the day after our Ballroom performance to play another show. He explained to us that Terlingua is where people go when they think Marfa is too uptight. We found that this is true.

The only thing we knew about Terlingua was nothing. I mean, we'd seen the word on the Jerry Jeff Walker record Viva Terlingua, but that's all. In any case, 20 or so Marfians followed us down and as seen in the following video, things got weird. Boyd Elder baptized us all in synch to our music. Dogs ran wild, dusty locals danced hard, Adam and Jona DJed the instant after party at the end of the Earth. Da Stanky Leg echoed across the canyons all the way to Mexico.

Sincere gratitude to everyone for setting us up, printing beautiful art-object posters, BYOBing, dancing, hanging out, taking us on long drives, getting us presents, picking us up when our car ran out of gas, and making us feel welcome in our adopted metaphysical hometown. We've already had a powerful start to 2009, and it wouldn't have felt right without Marfa.

Extra gratitude to Ross Cashiola, Vance Knowles, Gory Smelley, Rob Crowley, Boyd Elder, all of Ballroom Marfa, and all of La Posada Milagro.

@ Fun Fun Fun Fest in Austin, TX. Photo by Patrick Dentler.

The year is coming to a close. It seems as though America is slowly transforming into a place of which I can be proud to call home.

In celebration, we're playing these shows across Europe: