According to its website, “YACHT is a band, belief system, and business conducted by Jona Bechtolt and Claire L. Evans.” Moreover, “YACHT encourages online dissemination of all things.”
The band’s latest release, See Mystery Lights (DFA, 2009) was recorded in Marfa, Texas, a place famous for unexplained “ghost lights.” With this and the band’s straightforward mission statement in mind, ALARM asked the band to make a list of its five favorite natural phenomena.
1. Ball lightning
“Ball lightning is the true unknown — never verified, rarely photographed, used always as a catch-all for paranormal events that defy any other explanation. It’s the ghost in the machine. The great beast himself, Aleister Crowley, reportedly experienced a “dazzling globe” of ball lightning during a thunderstorm on Lake Pasquaney in 1916; he is one among many a hundred humans beings to ever see the phenomenon first-hand.”
2. Spontaneous human combustion
“Go out with a bang, right?”
3. Bioluminescence
“Anyone who doesn’t think we don’t live in a sci-fi world every second of every day has never swum in a sea of bioluminescent organisms at night.”
4. The Bloop
“‘The bloop’ is the name for a powerful, ultra-low-frequency underwater sound recorded by the NOAA in the nineties. Different from all other known sounds, it comes from a remote point deep in the south Pacific — and it’s fucking loud, louder than anything else in the natural world. Those of us who are initiates of H.P. Lovecraft find nothing funny about this: it’s the call of Cthulu. You heard it here first.
See also: The Taos Hum.”
5. Aurora Borealis / Aurora Australis
“YACHT’s long-term goal as a band, as trans-humanists, and as appreciators of the sublime, is to see the aurorae light up the ionosphere from the International Space Station’s cupola windows. Our even longer-term goal is to see Jupiter and Saturn’s gas-giant auroras from the cupola windows of our personal space pods.”