Los Angeles-based YACHT released Ringtone last month, the third track from the concept-bending and genre-defying album ‘I Thought The Future Would Be Cooler’, out now in the US, and out December 4 in the UK via Downtown Records. Now, they have shared Ringtone as remixed by Hot Chip’s Joe Goddard, which you can take a listen to via Soundcloud below.
Goddard says about the remix: ‘I love YACHT, I think their music and their live performances are mesmerising and they are just plain good people. For this release I wanted to make an old-fashioned Chicago banger as if the Eurythmics were remixed by DJ Pierre’
Ringtone is a centerpiece of the album: a frantic and surprisingly heavy pop song that sounds like Arthur Russell got in a bar fight with Cibo Matto over some unanswered texts from the Dust Brothers. It has been given the remix treatment it deserves, with Hot Chip’s Joe Goddard delivering a distinctive Chicago-house rework of the original, packing a rubbery, disco-inflected punch.
‘I Thought The Future Would Be Cooler’ is a sweeping and visionary critique of the 21st century, introduced to the world through a series of technological subversions orchestrated by the band like hacking Ubers API to reveal a music video and remix, when prices surged in LA, as well as dropping a Google Maps pin to announce the albums arrival, and sending the cover art to fans via fax machine.
This album reveals YACHT at its most self-assured: critical, funny, tough, and musically diverse, crafting an infectious and hyperactive conceptual pop that seems to seep through the walls of an alternate universe. YACHT’s knowing references to technology, feminism, and media are layered in complex arrangements in songs about holograms and phones, police violence and identity, sex and the future.
More about YACHT? YACHT is a Los Angeles based conceptual pop group fronted by Jona Bechtolt and Claire L. Evans, which was first created in 2002, as a design studio operating under the acronym Young Americans Challenging High Technology. As technology became more evenly distributed, YACHT transformed into a word representing everything Jona and Claire touch, each medium informing the next. More traditional artists tend to compartmentalize their efforts, but like an adolescent trying on identities, from 2002-2015 YACHT have shapeshifted: from solo laptop performer to whacked-out performance artists, from harsh electronic comedians to composers, from a two-piece avant-garde karaoke group to a four-piece a no-wave broken disco band, all while working as commissioned artists, writers, editors, and speakers for organizations like TEDx, WIRED, MoMA, Rhizome, VICE, and more. The common thread: Claire and Jona’s distinct amalgamation of cynicism, optimism, and attention to the special details that keep their work interesting and idiosyncratic.
YACHT UK/EU live dates:
Nov 12 – Amsterdam, NL – Paradiso Noord
Nov 15 – Paris, FR – Badaboum
Nov 16 – London, UK – Oslo
Nov 17 – Manchester, UK – Night & Day
Nov 19 – Gent, BE – Vooruit Café
Nov 20 – Hamburg, DE – Molotow
Nov 21 – Istanbul, TR – Salon IKSV
Nov 22 – Cologne, DE – Geböude 9
Nov 23 – Berlin, DE – Lido
