(audience applauds)

Hi everyone.

My name is Claire Evans.

I'm Jona Bechtolt.

And together, we co-author an entity called Yacht,

based in Los Angeles, California.

Yacht is a band.

That's what we're known for, and that's why we're here.

But we see being a public entity as

an opportunity to create weird and interesting

on- and off-screen experiences for many different people

in many different mediums and on many different scales.

And here's a quick collage of some of the things

that we have made.

These objects range from traditional band souvenirs

like cassette tapes, merchandise pins,

kids got sticker sheets, an iphoness case,

to more esoteric projects, like a line of sunglasses.

Actually, they came out today.

It was awesome for us.

A laptop sleeve,

which was designed to look like a manila envelope,

which we created when the original MacBook Air

was unveiled in 2008, and Steve Jobs

pulled it out of a manila envelope, of course.

Or, finally, a free iphoness app called Five Every Day,

which gives its users five interesting things to do

in the city of Los Angeles every day

that we select and write about.

As a band, however, we've been releasing albums,

singles, and compilations on CD, cassette, vinyl,

and digital formats since 2002.

On literally every scale.

Yeah, from self-made CDRs, printed risograph-style

on just paper...

To albums with elaborate global packaging

and global reach.

We really love to experiment with format and distribution.

For example, last year, we recorded a song called

Party at the NSA, which was a protest song against

the unwarranted government surveillance of private citizens.

But we know that in the 21st century,

a protest song can't really just be music.

So we designed the Party at the NSA Fundraising Campaign,

selling the song online in exchange for donations to

the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who,

as you may know, litigate on behalf of public interest

against the US government and the corporations that

collude with it to invade the privacy of innocent citizens.

After we were invited to perform Party at the NSA

on the Capitol steps during Stop Watching Us,

the largest anti-surveillance rally to date,

this project evolved from just being a digital experiment

to a very real-world protest.

The way that we see it, it's one thing to create text,

design, and music that engages people online, but it's

a lot more fun to bring those experiences into the world.

As musicians, our bread and butter is live performance,

so forging offline connections with people in the real world

is really important to us.

As you may know, in the creative field,

one of the questions you get in interviews

and just from people is, you know, what is your inspiration?

Which, when it's directed towards a musician,

we think means something more like, where does a song begin?

What is the seed of the song?

And it can seem kind of miraculous when you listen to music

to imagine that a song could emerge from nothing.

But it doesn't, of course.

Like any form of art, a song is like a snowball.

It doesn't emerge into the world fully formed.

It begins as something small, even inconsequential.

The real work is in rolling that tiny pebble down the hill,

through the world, gathering weight and substance

as you go along.

In our minds, this is a process...

That can go on forever.

Forever.

And it's really about finding the right place to stop.

Let us give you an example.

So, in August of last year, we started making a new song

and I started with just a bass line.

(synthy bass line)

Throughout history, a cool bass line has really been

the foundation of a good song, we think.

(audience laughs)

For us, at least.

We want to talk to you about the process, though,

that transforms something as simple as a bass line

into a song, and then to something much bigger than a song.

But let's go back to the bass line.

We sat with it for a while,

but we knew that we needed a hook.

So I rifled through my notebooks, and I found a line

that I'd literally scribbled in the margins.

Where does this disc go?

It was actually a lyric that I misheard in a different song,

but we thought it was funny, and humor is important,

so we laid down the scratch vocal.

♫ Where does this disco?

♫ Ain't rock roll

♫ Ain't disco

♫ Where does this disco?

♫ Ain't rock roll

♫ Ain't disco

It clicked immediately into that bass line.

And as we looped this hook and listened to it

over and over again in our studio,

it began to evoke a very specific interest for us:

The decaying role of physical media

in the buying and selling of music.

We began to think about those boxes and boxes

of CDs and vinyl LPs that hitch a ride

with us around the world on tour.

When the compact disc was

first commercially introduced in the early 80s,

it was marketed as a more durable, more portable,

and higher fidelity alternative to the vinyl record.

Advertisements produced by Sony and Philips,

who created the technology in tandem,

extolled the virtue of the laser playhead,

which wouldn't damage the CD

the way that a needle wears into the grooves of a record.

It was even called unbreakable.

Yeah, one of the original marketing taglines was

pure, perfect sound forever.

The CD is inherently futuristic,

or future-proof, as we were told.

But, of course, as we all know, that's not true.

For one, technology eventually outpaced

the allegedly perfect fidelity of the CD format,

and compact discs themselves are very delicate objects,

easily marred by scratches and smudges.

A little over 30 years after it was released,

the compact disc now exists

in a very strange and precarious position.

It remains the most commercial medium

for the buying and selling of music.

In Japan, 85% of music is still purchased on compact disc.

And yet despite that ubiquity, it feels obsolete.

There's really no cultural cache for CD collectors.

Of course, this is a subjective assessment,

but it feels really true to our experience.

We design and sell plenty of CDs of our own music,

but it's probably been 10 years since I've bought a CD.

We very rarely buy them for ourselves.

Like a lot of consumers, we've switched

to streaming services, which are devalsuing music

to its lowest point in history.

Instead of $10 for a piece of plastic

containing a dozen songs, we now pay $10 a month

for access to nearly every song ever recorded.

The advantage is so great that it has converted us,

whose work it may or may not devalsue,

which doesn't really bode well for the compact disc.

For a lot of people, a CD is no longer

an object of value in of itself.

It's more like a place where digital music

is temporarily imprisoned.

Once the songs are freed and encoded to the cloud,

the CD itself becomes nothing more than an empty vessel.

No better than a coaster.

All of this is to say,

we started writing a song about compact discs.

Not...

not literally about compact discs,

but using that metaphor of the simultaneous

ubiquity and obsolescence of the compact disc

and the physical media itself to talk about something else

that toes the line between existence and non-existence.

Love.

Love.

And so with those parameters in place,

the rest of the lyrics came really easily.

We thought about loops, erasure, spinning,

and reflections, but before we were anywhere near

finishing the song, we began designing the physical release

and its accompanying materials.

We often consider how a song will look

before we're even done settling on how it sounds.

The process of design and composition inform one another.

Making a CD about CDs in a landscape where

CDs are growing obsolete was a really interesting

design challenge for us.

The logo was easy, obviously,

since the title of the song was a pun,

we thought a visual pun would be cheap, but appropriate.

But what about the thing itself?

How do we turn this mundane object into a desirable,

even beautiful thing?

Selling physical copies of music

is not an impossible pursuit.

As you may know, there's been a huge resurgence

in the popularity of vinyl.

In an age of intangible media, people really respond to

the tactility of records.

We sell far more vinyl than CDs at our shows,

and that even more maligned medium, the cassette tape,

has actually hit a nerve with a lot of DIY artists

and labels looking to find cheap ways

to copy and distribute music.

As of 2012, the indie cassette label Burger Records

had sold 100,000 tapes.

Perhaps the CD could experience a similar revival

in coming generations, becoming a fetish object

for people far enough removed from the technology's

initial dominance to find it retro or kitsch.

So, with this in mind, when we set out to design

the physical packaging for Where Does This Disco,

we started by searching for rare and interesting

varieties of compact discs in the wild.

What's known as a Mini-Max, fan disc,

or clear-etched disc caught our eyes.

It's a three-inch disc

suspended in a normal size clear platter,

used a lot in promotional materials in the 90s.

We saw these discs as a perfect opportunity

for another visual joke,

so we designed the CD to look like a tiny vinyl LP

being pulled out of a white-label sleeve,

the kind of sleeve popularized by dance music

and now, more infamously, by the digital artwork

for the new U2 album that nobody seemed to want.

(audience laughs)

We got really, really into the detail,

so this tiny strip on the inner ring of the CD

is called the mirror band, and it's usually etched

with the name of the manufacturer and serial number

of the barcodes associate with the product.

But we saw it as another fragment of compact disc arcana

and the ideal spot to hide a secret message.

The Compact Disc is Dead!

Long Live the Compact Disc.

We worked really closely with the manufacturer

during this process, and we learned a lot.

We really discovered that we didn't know

very much at all about how CDs are made.

As it turns out, like most things,

if you scrutinize it enough,

this seemingly mundane object comes from

a really beautiful and interesting process.

So, every mass-produced CD begins with something

called a glass master,

the round plate of glass containing the disc's master data.

A glass master is only used in the manufacturing process

and is usually destroyed or stored

after the CDs are printed.

But we thought it was such an interesting object

that we convinced the manufacturer

to make us an extra glass master.

[Jona] It was really nice of them to do that.

This is the Where Does This Disco glass master.

It's a process object, if you will,

brought out from the shadows.

We also learned that the foil coating on the back of a CD

doesn't store any data.

It's actually just there to reflect the light back to the

laser playhead, allowing the data to be read on the disc.

The music is in the plastic,

and so we entreated that sweet, long-suffering

manufacturing plant to create a run of CDs

without their mirror foil, a clear, unplayable disc

containing the entirety of our musical catalog.

(laughs)

In a sense, this useless object allows the CD

to retain a kind of integrity.

There's no way to listen to the songs etched onto it,

but there's also no way that we know of

to release those digital files from their prison.

We really hope that fans

go to the effort of proving us wrong.

And some have said they will.

[Jona] Yeah.

Then we descended into a vortex of CD obsession,

so, we commissioned the building of two,

four-foot CDs from acrylic and iridescent foil

to use as stage props from our tour.

So it's kind of our take on disco balls.

We designed tour t-shirts with iridescent foil discs.

And we built a website, a single-serving website

for the tour.

The url is naturally wheredoesthisdisco.today.

The biggest challenge of this project

has been designing an experience that suggests that

a CD might still be a desirable object,

even an art object.

But part of what determines a piece of art's value

is its limited accessibility,

what the cultural critic Walter Benjamin called its aura,

its very specific locations in space and time.

But CDs are, by definition, mass-produced objects.

Every CD is a mechanical reproduction

of the original recording.

That said, there are still ways to make these reproductions

feel like they have an aura of specialness by

orchestrating an experience surrounding their consumption.

So, on this tour that we've been on, at the merch table,

we make fans believe that this Where Does This Disco

CD package, which we produced in an edition of 500,

is the only medium by which the songs can be experienced.

Of course, it's ultimately a losing battle.

We know that fans will eventually rip these songs off

the discs and play them on their most accessible devices.

But the game is in the experience,

so we created a run of carbonless-copy NDAs,

which demand the merch-buying concert attendees

promise, under penalty of law, to keep a secret

before they can purchase the CD itself.

The effect is completed by signs

pasted all around the venue, which...

Express that a secret is being disseminated on the premises,

and that attendees' presence binds them legally

in the keeping of this secret.

A dummy CCTV camera and signs add to the mood.

This is actually from the merch table in New York.

[Jona] Yeah.

You can buy these on Amazon, they're like $20.

It's amazing.

Admittedly, this is an extreme, and largely symbolic,

way of countering the growing obsolescence

of physical media in our industry,

but the question which became interesting to us

over the course of this project was,

could we use a song

and its accompanying multimedia treatment

to suggest preemptive nostalgia for the compact disc?

And by suggesting that nostalgia, do we modify

people's perceptions of where these objects and their makers

exist on the continuum of technological history?

The thing is that

we have a lot in common with compact discs.

Where does music live?

Does it live in an encoded file of a song?

Or does it live in those performances of those songs

in a live setting?

Or somewhere in between, in some kind of abstract,

ineffable space where the idea of music exists?

In any of these cases, we're just a couple of

physical containers that serve to transmit ideas

from creator to consumer, from cloud to cloud.

As artists and as people, we're no more future-proof

than a foil-plated compact disc.

We're hyper-aware of this, which is why this baroque journey

into the medium of the CD has been so fascinating for us.

It's been a way for us to explore our own limitations,

to punch against the entropy of our work,

and to have some fun in the process.

We've made a point

in the 12 years that this band has existed

to perpetually extend the boundaries of what we do

with design experiments like this one.

Yacht is not just music.

It's text, design, video, and above all, ideas.

This keeps us from becoming bored, foremost,

and from settling into predictable patterns of creativity.

It's what keeps Yacht alive.

So, to return to that original question,

Where does a song begin?

Thank you.

Mmhmm.

As it turns out, that's not

the interesting question to us.

It's rather where the song ends that's interesting.

As a piece of information, music is finite.

There are opening notes and final notes.

There is a file size.

But if a song can speak to a moment in time,

to a subcultural trend,

to a shared or manufactured nostalgia,

then its boundaries can be expanded dramatically.

It can grow beyond a temporal existence

and beyond a crummy plastic jewel case.

So where does it end?

If you think of a song as something more than music,

if you think of a song as a point of departure

for a process of design,

then it never has to end at all.

Thank you.

(audience applauds)

(audience cheers)

♫ Don't you wanna make me move

♫ When the needle's locked in the grove, yeah

♫ I made myself a copy of you

♫ When you told me that my dreams would come true

♫ I'm spinning round and round for you

♫ A lonely one

♫ Check check, checking on two

♫ I'm sitting in an empty room

♫ Pixels acting with pictures of you, you, you

♫ Where does this disco?

♫ Ain't rock roll, ain't disco

♫ Where does this disco?

♫ Ain't rock roll, ain't disco

♫ Where does this disco?

♫ Ain't rock roll, ain't disco

♫ Where does this disco?

♫ Ain't rock roll, ain't disco

♫ Don't you wanna make me move

♫ It feels like we're stuck in a loop

♫ Repetition is a truth

♫ Over and over and over

♫ And all night

♫ I'll keep on playing hits for you

♫ Fade me out and raise the lights

♫ I try to split myself in two, in two

♫ I fall in love with all of you, you, you

♫ Where does

♫ Don't you wanna make me move

♫ This disco

♫ When the needle's locked in the groove, yeah

♫ Aint rock roll

♫ Don't you wanna make me move

♫ Aint disco

♫ When the needle's locked in the groove, yeah

♫ Locked in the groove, yeah

♫ Locked in the groove, yeah

♫ Locked in the, locked in the,

♫ locked in, locked in, locked in, locked in

♫ They're rocking out the way you look

♫ Tonight, two sides, one hook

♫ And it sounded just like you

♫ Singing all the words I knew

♫ The memories are made to fade

♫ A broken heart won't erase

♫ I'll always remember your shape

♫ A clear circle that time can't break, break, break

♫ Where does this disco

♫ Ain't rock roll

♫ Ain't disco

♫ Where does this disco

♫ It ain't punk

♫ Ain't disco

♫ Where does this disco

♫ Ain't us

♫ It ain't disco

♫ Where does this disco

♫ Ain't rock roll

♫ Ain't disco

(audience cheers)

Thanks so much!