Portland-bred duo Yacht have never been ones for sticking to the conventional. With admission to software piracy, a self-confessed obsession with PowerPoint presentations and a genre of ‘mildly-psychedelic danceable 2000s-era grunge music’ on their CV, they certainly aren’t an artist you can pigeonhole.

Sticking with the idea of the unexplainable and somewhat bizarre, new album See Mystery Lights is based on the Marfa lights – an optical phenomenon that can only be seen just outside the far West Texas town of Marfa, USA.

Yacht’s founding (and at the time only) member Jona Bechtolt witnessed the lights with girlfriend Claire Evans before deciding an artistic ode to the experience was necessary, causing Yacht to organically morph into a duo.

“That was such a shared experience it was difficult for us to sit down and make individual work about it, because we really wanted to honour the experience by making some art about it,” Evans explains, fresh off the plane from touring Europe. “It ended up being the only solution, for us to make a record together.”

The laptop-driven sounds of the album certainly don’t appear to restrict Yacht, with each track taking on a sense of individuality and isolation from the rest, varying from dark intimidating tones through to happy pop jingles. The said diversity of Yacht is something Evans puts downs to the pair’s generalist nature.

“We don’t like to focus all our energy on one style of music or one specific genre decision or concept or theme. We see our band as a revolutionary entity – as a living creature, if you will – and overspecialisation is what kills out animal species, and in the biological world that’s what causes extinction. So we try to be as general as possible and avoid typecasting ourselves as an electronic band or a rock band or arty, or whatever people want to call it.”

While Evans feels See Mystery Lights has been somewhat misinterpreted by many, she says they are thrilled with the reaction, having received many rave reviews.

“We didn’t really know what to expect. The two of us considered it to be quite a dark record, and a lot of them, especially in the US said – œsummer pop album’ or – œhappy pop music’,” Evans admits. “Somehow we’ve managed to be so subversive that people don’t even realise our songs are incredibly esoteric and kind of dark, which is exciting and it makes our job a lot easier. The whole record sort of came to be automatically. We sat down and made it and woke up two months later and it was done. We sort of didn’t even know really what we had made, so to see that people had liked it was a real validation.”

Independent label DFA released See Mystery Lights after Yacht penned a pastiche to LCD Soundsystem in the form of Summer Song, but Evans explains the Yacht/DFA relationship formed far earlier than that in a random strike of luck.

“Jona had contacted DFA maybe three or four years ago to have someone maybe do a remix for his old band The Blow,” Evans remembers. “It never panned out but he stayed in email contact with the guy that runs DFA on a day-to-day basis, Jonathan Galkin. About a year later he got a call out of the blue from Jonathan saying, ‘We need someone to go on tour with LCD Soundsystem, tomorrow!’ He really had no idea what to expect at all and was kind of terrified actually, but when he showed up he was thrown into this kind of incredible DFA world where everyone is super talented and incredibly nice.”

After visiting Australia for Future Music Festival a matter of months ago, See Mystery Lights has whet the appetite for another Yacht voyage to our fair shores. This time around they will line-up on the ever-enticing Meredith Music Festival bill, accompanied by some sideshows.

“The Yacht show changes every time. We make a huge, Herculean effort to avoid redundancy in our band. But it usually involves Jona and I in the flesh; some kind of epic multimedia video thing going on; some level of interactive experience will happen; a lot of physical touching; a lot of invasion of personal space; a lot of weird demands being made upon the audience and hopefully a lot of dancing and sweating and screaming and running around.”

If you aren’t enticed already by Yacht, Evans parts ways with an honorary Australian of the Year speech to win over the doubters. “We love Australia; everything about it is just a little nicer than the US!”

Yacht arrives in Australia next week for a string of shows, including Meredith Music Festival.

Friday December 11 – Meredith Music Festival
Saturday December 12 – Revolver, Melbourne
Tuesday December 15 – Oxford Art Factory, Sydney
Wednesday December 16 – Brisbane Powerhouse