YACHT

YACHT — the art-pop project of Jona Bechtolt, writer and “Broad Band” author Claire L. Evans, and Rob Kieswetter — has treated pop music as a conceptual laboratory since the mid-2000s. In 2019, years before generative AI became a culture war, they bet an entire album on it.

Composing with the machine, by hand

“Chain Tripping” took three years to make. The band converted their entire back catalog into MIDI data and trained tools including Google’s MusicVAE to generate melodies, basslines, beats, and lyrics; collaborators like Ross Goodwin, Allison Parrish, and Mario Klingemann contributed generative text and visuals. Then came the rule that defined the record: the humans could select, cut, and arrange the machine’s output, but never add, improvise, or harmonize — “a subtractive process,” as Bechtolt put it.

The result — glitchy, off-kilter, unmistakably YACHT — was nominated for the Grammy for Best Immersive Audio Album in 2020, and the making-of documentary “The Computer Accent” (2022) followed the band through the grind. Evans has been clear the machine was never autonomous: a human stayed in the loop at every step, and the band saw the album as “an opportunity to teach the machine our values.”

Evans, also a noted technology writer, has since observed that generative tools were losing the “wonkiness and strangeness” the band prized — the polished era of AI music being less artistically interesting to them than the broken one. YACHT’s stance is thus enthusiastic but exacting: AI as raw creative material, valuable precisely when it is weird.